EDITORIAL. The arms of honor of Eric Dupond-Moretti, a new example of the degradation of parliamentary debate

Elisabeth Borne called her Minister of Justice to reproach him “behaviour that has no place” in the hemicycle. The Conference of Presidents will take up his case, but the Assembly does not have the power to sanction a minister in office.

A minister of the Republic who swings arms of honor in the middle of the hemicycle is one more sign of the deterioration of parliamentary debate. A drift that has accelerated since the legislative elections of last June. The Assembly looks a little more like a circus every day.

First, no doubt, because of the presence of a radical left rebounded to block. She announced her intention to transform the Assembly into Zad. It’s quite successful, as shown, in particular, by the treatment recently inflicted on Olivier Dussopt treated as“assassin” by a rebellious deputy, or with his portrait stuck on a soccer ball crushed by another elected official wearing his tricolor scarf. But the executive also has faults. In June, for lack of an absolute majority, he made a point of bringing dialogue to life in Parliament, of bringing about majorities of compromise, on the model of German-style coalitions. Emmanuel Macron promised to break with an overly vertical mode of governance. It missed ! If we add a form of “twitterisation” or “hanounisation” of the political debate, which boils down to a succession of clashes, the search for buzz, against a backdrop of overplayed indignation, there is cause for concern.

The risk of a democratic crisis

Incidents in the Assembly, there have certainly already been some under the Third and Fourth Republics. But that’s not reassuring. Because the periods during which these violent incidents multiplied in the House, as we said at the time, are precisely periods of serious democratic crisis. At the beginning of the Third Republic when the regime was still fragile: at the turn of the century during the Dreyfus affair, then in the 1930s when an anti-Semitic extreme right attacked Léon Blum in particular; or even during the Fourth Republic shaken by the war in Algeria.

When Parliament no longer serves as a place of debate to democratically resolve the conflict, it moves elsewhere, into the streets, and often takes a more violent turn. This is the threat reinforced day after day by the spectacle of the great Tragic Circus of the National Assembly.