When a father tracks down and then beats up a teenager whom he considers responsible for the sexual assault of his daughter. When another father shoots a young person who, according to him, is extorting his son… Each time, it’s the same idea: to take justice into your own hands. Vendettas are nothing very new, but today they must be given a very worrying political reading. The subtitle of these punitive actions is the postulate that justice would be lax and ineffective: a symptom of a major crisis of confidence in our institutions fueled with great fanfare by news channels and social networks.
Politics in all this is responsible for having under-endowed justice, making it concretely slower, but it is also responsible for having institutionalized the primacy of immediacy over rational thought. It was Nicolas Sarkozy who was one of the first to apply the combo “a news item – a law” in the 2000s. When affect and emotion take precedence over reflection, public opinion expects results and symbolism. Whereas precisely, politics should be there to set limits.
Is it up to politicians to respond to news items? Not exactly. Politicians must regularly remind that our institutions are the only guarantors of our life in society and that the exploitation of passions and impulses cannot lead to more freedom.
Where are our politicians, especially the right supposed to embody order, when it comes to remembering that these rules that govern our lives are the fruit of centuries and centuries of compromise? Letting mistrust in justice flourish without reacting when citizens think that they will never be better served than by themselves, that’s called desertion.
So yes, we must respond to those French people who think that the laws are not useful and that justice is useless. Yes, you have to respond to a Cyril Hanouna who advocates a “immediate trial in a few hours with direct life imprisonment” for cases like that of little Lola.
It is not right-thinking to remember that justice always takes time and why this time is necessary to avoid arbitrariness. Otherwise, tomorrow, at the request of expeditious justice, we will have small group political responses. To the demand for authoritarianism, we will have authoritarian political responses.
In recent years, populists around the world have rightly destabilized democracies with a heavy blow to institutions. As a reminder, during the last presidential election, two far-right candidates proposed to modify or circumvent the constitution to impose new, more restrictive rules. One of his personalities even made 42% in the second round.