Last week, the bible of the markets, the venerable Financial Times, put its feet in the dish by calling in “one” for a “radical change of institutions” in France, and by headlining on the project of a “Sixth Republic “. In form, the FT journalist has a field day: in a long analysis embellished with investigative elements, he presents his readers with a particularly caustic picture of the French political situation, both at the level of the organization of the country than in its current management by Emmanuel Macron. By first evoking the demonstrators who have been burning garbage cans in the streets of Paris in recent days: “They knew that they would thus be part of a Parisian tradition” glamorous “which goes from 1789 to 1968, passing through 1944″, ironically the liberal daily. “French anger transcends Macron’s pensions and authoritarianism. This is a generalized and lasting rage against the State, and its incarnation, the President”, notes the FT before worrying that the French could vote “populist in 2027” (with Marine Le Pen) after the Americans, Brits, and Italians.
Doctor’s prescription Financial Times for the patient France is without appeal: “France cannot go on like this. It is time to end the Fifth Republic, with its all-powerful President – the closest thing to an elected dictator in the developed world – and usher in a less autocratic Sixth Republic”. And to add a provocative touch: “Emmanuel Macron could well be the right person to ensure such a change”. Provocative when all the opinion polls for a few weeks show a very strong resentment rising in the French population against the President of the Republic. “Emmanuel Macron reminds every Frenchman of his boss: a cultured know-it-all who despises his staff”incidentally pings the FT.
Under these conditions, how could this leader, who in a few years become yet another unloved president after being presented by all the people who count in Paris as a minor prodigy, could find enough resources to stimulate a real revolution in the French institutional system? ? In recent months, however, the president has consulted extensively, particularly with political leaders, to reflect on the institutional reforms he promised during the last presidential campaign.
An additional difficulty is that the entire institutional and administrative system is now in crisis, and not just the presidential function, as coldly dissected by the Financial Times : “The technocrats of the Republic have gradually extended their power to the most isolated villages of the country. Almost everything that moves in the largest country in Western Europe is administered from a few square kilometers of Paris. The various waves of decentralization launched since 1982 have never succeeded (…) The aura of the technocrats has also tarnished, especially since they have merged into a self-perpetuating caste. The composition of the current ruling class leaves a disproportionate place to the sons of the white, literate upper middle class, who pass together from the Parisian nursery school on the Left Bank to the preparatory school on the Left Bank, ou they crammed for the exams of the grandes écoles, before acquiring their own apartment on the Left Bank (…) French technocrats spend their professional lives in a few districts inside the ring road, which surrounds the courtyard like a moat Parisian. They treat the rest of France almost like a colony, inhabited by smelly peasants who have failed to assimilate the Parisian culture they were taught in school and who vote for the far right or the leftmost “.
But beyond these “technocrats”, the Financial Times points out above all the institutional shortcomings of France: “It would be possible to describe the functioning of the Republic without mentioning the Parliament, which is of practically no importance. France now has three powers: the presidency, the judiciary and the street. If the President decides on something, only the streets can stop him – blocking the country with demonstrations and strikes”.
This diagnosis strangely echoes the political lessons that the young Emmanuel Macron drew fifteen years ago from these discussions with Michel Rocard or his mentor Henry Hermand. Does President Macron ever look back on his past, as if to better rediscover the ardor of his political debut? If he reads again, he could have surprises. In 2011, this scholar wrote an article in the magazine Esprit, with the strange title – The Labyrinths of Politics. What can we expect for 2012 and beyond? » – but with a surprisingly telling content: “We cannot and should not expect a man and 2012 will not bring more than before the demiurge. Far from the charismatic power and the Caesarian tension of the encounter between a man and his people, it is the elements of reconstruction of responsibility and political action that could be usefully rebuilt.. This analysis could pass today for a self-criticism of his own relationship to power since 2017.
In this text, the young Macron attacks French hyper-presidentialism, a consequence in particular of the establishment of the five-year term in the Fifth Republic: “Nothing is done so that, in a mature democracy and a society with increasingly complex issues, debates can take place and take place according to an appropriate time frame and modalities. Political time lives in the preparation of this presidential spasm around which everything contracts and during which all problems must find an answer. » When he was not yet president, or even minister, Macron wanted to “debate”, with a view to the long term. But, at the same time, in this text dating from 2011, the future president justified a democratic parenthesis on certain “structural” questions, such as budgetary questions, and the dispossession of the populations by the European supranational framework. This denoted a rather problematic relationship to popular sovereignty. He expressed on this occasion a pure technocratic posture without any complex: “ Because the treatment of long-term problems sometimes involves a form of “reduction” of political powers, that is to say the establishment of supra-political mechanisms which guarantee constant application over time, protection against political hazards” .
And Emmanuel Macron later deplores the functioning of the “media politico” system: “Emergency response therefore involves a form of media-political action whose effectiveness is reduced. The laws adopted are thus too often not applied for lack of application decrees, their effectiveness almost never measured, and they create instability and complexity that are harmful to the citizen. » The future minister and president then takes the example of housing policy: “Thus the urgency, repeated each year when winter arrives, of poor housing often leads to ineffective or symbolic measures (the enforceable right to housing) while the real problems (the scarcity of supply, the fragmentation of skills , the Malthusianism of the communes, etc.) are only partially dealt with. Short-sightedness and urgency short-sightedness that leads politics to “react” rather than building articulated action. »
And to recognize that“Acting politically today no longer has the same meaning as it did thirty years ago. This involves coordinating diverse skills, scattered actors, navigating between multiple communities (citizens, associations, scholars, businesses, etc.), often under media pressure which imposes quasi-transparency, in real time, of the decision. » Emmanuel Macron is therefore critical of the weight of the media and the urgency they give to politics, but he does not seem very optimistic either about the action of the State as such, with the institutional developments that led a historically centralized country like France to have to deal with new realities: “Decentralization, the dismemberment of the central state which has multiplied the number of independent administrative authorities, the growing normative role of the European Communities, among others, have gradually led to the bursting of responsibility and political action. »
In reality, we already feel the emergence through these regrets of a posture of authoritarian withdrawal. However, the time of his accession to the Élysée was still far away. ” Now, what to do ? », simply wondered the future minister, taking up the Leninist questioning. Twelve years ago, it was indeed an in-depth reform of the institutions that the young Macron called for. From 2011, he wants to restore the power of Parliament, hoping that the latter, a minority under the Fifth Republic, will become stronger and more representative. “Contemporary political action requires ongoing deliberation […] which makes it possible to influence the decision, to orient it, to adapt it to reality”, theorizes the one who is then only a simple informal adviser to François Hollande. Everything is already written, and Emmanuel Macron seems particularly upset that France has sidelined parliamentarism from political action: “Political action is continuous and the debate is part of the action. It is the double virtue of parliamentarism and social democracy that our Republic still too often tends to neglect”. The article does not say why, once in power, Emmanuel Macron did just the opposite. Perhaps quite simply because the Constitution of the Fifth Republic allows it.
Marc Endeweld.