Emmanuel Macron is a minority president, having won the second round of the election thanks to a tactical or principled vote to keep out the far right. Now, through the leveraging effect of a Parliamentary election system in France that is both unfair and archaic, and which helps presidential government suppress pluralistic politics, he wants not just a majority but political domination after the two rounds of voting in the legislative elections on June 11th and June 18th. If he achieves his aim, for which his prime minister Édouard Philippe from the Alain Juppé wing of the French Right is actively campaigning, it would be bad news for French democracy and all those citizens who want to see it reinvigorated. That includes those who want to give the new government a chance.
Pluralism is part and parcel of a living, deliberative and participatory democracy. It allows ideas to hold sway, ideas that emerge from discussion, rational debate and an attentive listening to others. It leads to opposition that is stimulating because it is constructive and intelligent, bringing forward undervalued interests and little known causes. It forces a fragile ruling majority to do deals with active, acknowledged and respected minority groups. In summary, it is the inverse of those automatic Parliamentary majorities which, obtained through party discipline and the authoritarianism of the executive, have consistently harmed the country's deep yearning for a reinvigorated democracy, one that listens to the people's hopes and builds trust.
To limit the expression of such pluralism to the actions of a government made up of a mixture of partisan individuals, career politicians and competent professionals – none of which excludes them from being sincere and wanting to act and serve – is to increase the presidential dominance of our public life. By dint of becoming president of the Republic, a single man thus becomes the sole architect and guarantor of political, social, cultural and ideological diversity of a nation that is profoundly divided after a succession of missed opportunities over the last 15 years that have torn its social fabric apart. But who cannot see that it is this very obsessive search for a “presidential majority” that is the cause of those divisions, handing all power to a single individual rather than giving it back to the diversity of all? What did presidents Jacques Chirac (elected 2002), Nicolas Sarkozy (2007) and François Hollande (2012) do with their absolute majorities if not increase the feeling of democratic dispossession to the point they divided, broke and ruined their own political families?
For thirty years a blind and stubborn determination to continue with this outdated institutional vision has led to the far right being an impediment on our political life. The system's apparent authoritarian effectiveness – immense power is placed in the hands of the head of state, who is cast as the sacred guardian of national life – is just short term. It is simply built on sand, forcing the beneficiary of this power to continually play the game, like Sisyphus pushing his rock in vain. We can all see where this has led in the past and if the newly-elected president, carried away by his unexpected victory, forgets this then there is little doubt that he, too, will be forced to pay the price. In the second round of the 2002 presidential election the far right's Jean-Marie Le Pen, Jacques Chirac's opponent, received 5.5 million votes. Fifteen years later, the far right's vote in the second round of the 2017 election on May 10th had almost doubled to 10.6 million votes, despite a television debate performance by Marine Le Pen which laid bare the Front National's own brand of political violence. The figure is a testament to the disastrous presidencies of Sarkozy and Hollande.
As a beneficiary of what had gone before, Emmanuel Macron cannot claim to own the votes that voters cast in his favour to ward off the far right while not for a moment renouncing their own convictions in all their diversity. Having attracted just 18.19% of registered voters in the first round of the election (24.01% of those who actually voted), his original manifesto clearly does not attract majority support. His score in the second round represented just 43.61% of registered voters, which is less than half of the electorate, as more than 16 million people chose to abstain, spoil their ballot paper or leave it blank. This last figure represents a third of all those registered to vote, who themselves make up no more than 90% of all citizens of voting age. To oppose handing full Parliamentary powers to this new presidency, through the domination of an obedient majority in the National Assembly, is consistent with Mediapart's firm stance between the two rounds of voting, a refusal to confuse the advent of an authoritarian presidency with the prolonging of an incomplete democracy (see 'Saying no to disaster').
Having avoided the worst, the task of deepening democracy now means resisting the presidential fait accompli which supporters of Emmanuel Macron are seeking to achieve in this June's Parliamentary elections under the label of 'La République en marche' (LER). Their desire for domination stems precisely from this form of 'old politics' they claim to have broken with. It's no coincidence that the main architects of the movement come from the two parties who have practised this old politics for a long time, the left-wing Socialist Party (PS), in particular, but also the right-wing UMP (now Les Républicains), who have both mercilessly stifled the nation's political diversity.
Beneath the self-proclaimed novelty of Emmanuel Macron there lingers an old world that intends to save itself and which is being revealed by this legislative campaign. On top of the various compromises made in relation to the promised moral rectitude, of which the affair involving ex-PS member and key En Marche! figure Richard Ferrand is symptomatic even if it has not been established that it involves any legal wrongdoing, there also is the decision to spare key figures from the previous presidency. Former prime minister Manuel Valls and employment minister Myrian El Khomri, who was responsible for the controversial new labour law under President Hollande, and who between them represent the worst symbols of the previous presidency and are synonymous with humiliation and brutal politics, are thus facing no challenge in their constituencies from LER candidates in these Parliamentary elections.
Democracy cannot be reduced simply to the institutions that are associated with it. It implies a common culture, in other words concrete practices. In January 2017, speaking in the context of the coming presidential election, a seasoned observer of the decaying French political scene, this loss of confidence in an ideal which is running out of steam, made a plea for “faith” in Parliamentary “representation”. Insisting on Parliament's role as a “monitor of the executive to avoid excesses, failures and abuses of power” he concluded with the demand that “the main strands that make up democratic opinion should be represented inside it, so that no one can suppress and stop debate and no one can destroy the monitoring”.
No to both presidential authoritarianism and populist sectarianism
This same author said that there could be no unity without diversity and without an acceptance of and - respect for - contrary arguments: “Pluralism doesn't just bring calm, it is also liberating … rather than a politics that seeks to crush others I am calling for a politics that listens, which accepts a diversity of opinions, which accepts them and even goes looking for them.” The author of these lines, taken from Résolution Française ('French Resolution', published by Éditions de l'Observatoire in 2017) is none other than the veteran centrist politician François Bayrou, today occupying a senior role as justice minister in President Macron's government.
The hegemony of a “presidential majority” that is dominant and sure of itself would be a radical contradiction of Bayrou's words. Especially as the new make-up of the government in itself offers absolutely no guarantee of extra democracy, given that the institutional culture of France's Fifth Republic is an invitation to herd-like, obedient and conformist majorities. Worse still, the zeal of the converted affecting the political newcomers in this government could also reinforce its inability to stand up to executive power.
But just as it obliges us to reject the blank cheque that constitutes an absolute majority, so the same democratic imperative invites us to reject the sectarianism of a single, monolithic opposition. Like a mirror image of La République en Marche's desire to dominate under this presidential system, the Left in all its diversity is faced with the hegemonic intent of the radical left La France Insoumise ('Unbowed France'), spurred on by the first-round score achieved by its candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
So even as the themes of democracy (plans for a Sixth Republic), society and the workplace (rejection of the new employment law), the environment (environmental transition) and Europe (democratisation of the European Union) unite for the first time all those sections of the Left that opposed or broke with the Hollande presidency as represented by Manuel Valls, the Left is divided and fragmented like never before. The person who commanded the field on the evening of the first round, Jean Mélenchon, has, unlike his role model François Mitterrand in the 1970s who championed unity to rebuild the Left, refused all dialogue, agreement or efforts at unity.
Commitment to democratic reconstruction cannot be limited to some virtual proclamation of a new Republic at some indeterminate time in the future. First it has to be demonstrated through democratic practices right here and now, in which political partners are respected, differences are listened to, people are brought together and insults, demonising of others, exclusions and exclusive stances are rejected. What should we make of candidates of La France Insoumise being systematically put up against candidates of unity who represented the spirit of resistance to the broken pledges of François Hollande's presidency?
This is what is happening in Paris, for example, with Caroline de Haas, an activist who was at the forefront of the fight against the new employment law and other citizen initiatives; in Besançon in eastern France with Barbara Romagnan, a stubborn socialist rebel who remained faithful to the commitments made to the electorate in 2012; in Grenoble in south-east France with candidates supported by the Green mayor Éric Piolle, even though he had called for voters to back Mélenchon in the first round of the presidential election and whose majority on the city council includes members of Mélenchon's own Parti de Gauche.
This populist sectarianism, which in objective terms acts as an ally to presidential authoritarianism, carries a strong risk of increasing the scale of the Left's defeat after its failure to make the second round of the presidential election. For the Left, in all its guises, has never been in so weak and in such a minority as it is now, a situation that can only grow worse given the morbid pleasure being taken in divisions and differences. Though the Left also failed to get through to the second round at the 2002 presidential election, the five left-wing candidates attracted 32.45% of the vote, a figure that rises to 42.89% when the far left candidates are counted too. In 2017 the total score of all candidates on the Left reached just 27.67%, one of its lowest levels historically.
In such an unfavourable context to believe that one sole political force can rise to the challenge of the opposition is not simply delusional, it aggravates the wounds caused to the Left under Hollande's presidency, especially when Manuel Valls was prime minister. The entire history of the Left is one of diversity, of being strengthened by its many strands and enriched by its numerous leanings. Each time that a political force has sought to wipe the slate clean to its advantage, claiming that it is the sole bearer of policy orthodoxy, failure and disillusion have been the ultimate outcome.
Bonapartism or authoritarianism, which have taken on different attires in France according to the historic circumstances, from Napoleon Bonaparte and Napoleon III to Charles de Gaulle, has also been the political stratagem by which the dominant classes have preserves their own interests, even if it meant silencing their quarrels. The cleverness of this strategy, especially if the person in charge is informed and experienced, has always been to gamble on division among those forces who are demanding freedom from the system. That is why we must hope that these Parliamentary elections favour the most diverse candidates in an opposition that is intelligent, agreed on the basics, non-sectarian, committed on issues affecting daily life and on concrete expectations, which is not taken in by mere words and which does not become intoxicated by its own anger.
“One cannot nor should not expect everything from one man” ... Rebuilding political action, its legitimacy and its effectiveness, thus requires thinking beyond the “presidential spasm” and beyond the “charismatic power and authoritarian tension of the encounter between one man and his people”. In other words, it means escaping from the short-term period of the election, when “political life is crushed” under the weight of “presidentialism”, in order to find that long-term “permanent debate”, that “double virtue of parliamentarism and social democracy that our Republic too often still tends to neglect”.
These words were published in the magazine Esprit in 2011 and their author is none other than Emmanuel Macron, who is now the beneficiary of the presidentialism that he then criticised. Beyond showing his own personal U-turn, these words express perfectly what it as stake in these Parliamentary elections: how to impose the vitality of a pluralist Parliament over the authoritarian dream of presidential government.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter