France: is friendship as important as family?

This turns friendship into a service, criticises Pierre-Romain Thionnet, MEP for the Patriots for Europe group, in Boulevard Voltaire:

“With her proposal to transform friendship into a service, Guetté is merely extending the logic of contracts and the influence of the law – phenomena that have always paved the way for the market and led to the good and the free being replaced by that which has value. … Guetté is turning herself into a mouthpiece for the prevailing ideology that has driven the fragmentation of those communities which offered protection from the market’s greed. By institutionalising friendship, Guetté has identified the enemy: the family, but also friendship as a phenomenon that has so far been spared the simultaneous encroachment of the state and the market.”