Clément Viktorovitch returns each week to the debates and political issues. Sunday March 26: the democratic legitimacy of political reform in the face of street anger.
This is now the big question – the only question, even – that matters in the political and social crisis we are going through: is the President of the Republic still legitimate to impose this pension reform? Well, he answered it himself last Tuesday during a meeting with Renaissance deputies. The statement leaked, and has already caused a lot of ink to flow: “The crowd, whatever it is, has no legitimacy in the face of the people who express themselves sovereign through their elected representatives“. This is Emmanuel Macron’s answer: this reform would be fully legitimate.
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Is this difference between the crowd and the people justified?
Emmanuel Macron is referring here to a famous passage from Victor Hugo, in The terrible year, where the confused strength of the crowd is effectively opposed to the greatness of the People. Now, what does Hugo really say in this text? “Here is the people: they are dying, a magnificent fighter, for progress. Here are the people: they take the Bastille, they displace all the shadows as they march. Here is the people: it makes itself a Republic, it reigns and deliberates”.
For Victor Hugo, a long-term popular protest movement, backed by public debate – that is to say, precisely what we see today on pensions –: this is what the people are ! This has nothing to do with the sentence of the Head of State: the crowd, whatever it is, has no legitimacy against the people who express themselves through their elected representatives.
Good, already, the deputies have never voted for the reform – we will come back to this; but, above all, for Emmanuel Macron, social movements would by nature be disqualified. The only legitimate way for the people to express themselves would be through election.
Does the election remain the principle on which our democracy rests?
It’s much more complicated than that. The historian Pierre Rosanvallon, Professor at the College de France, published in 2008 a major work entitled: Democratic legitimacy. His word is diaphanous: “Election does not guarantee that a government serves the general interest, or that it will remain there. The verdict of the ballot box cannot be the only standard of legitimacy”.
What Pierre Rosanvallon reminds us, and which is fundamental, is that the election is, in reality, a double fiction. On the one hand, it is as if the consent on the day of the election was worth consent for the rest of the mandate. On the other hand, we act as if the consent of a fraction of the people – a fraction that is more and more a minority, the more that there is more and more abstention – the consent, therefore, of a fraction of the people, was worth the consent of all the citizens. But these are never just fictions!
Fictions, of course, but aren’t they necessary for representative democracy? Without a doubt. Otherwise, how do we govern? They become unbearable if they are not supplemented, precisely, by other sources of democratic legitimacy. In particular: public opinion, civil society, trade unions or the street. Without any other source of legitimacy than the election, democracy becomes very undemocratic: it is nothing more than the regime in which the people are free one day, and slaves for the remaining five years. However, for the pension reform, let’s do the account. Union opposition is final. The rejection of public opinion is recorded: two thirds of French people are against this text, a stable figure over the long period, in all the polls. The street protest is massive: millions of people marched peacefully. And even, even the consent of parliamentarians has never been acquired, since the National Assembly could not vote on the text.
And what about the rejection of the motion of censure?
Yes, except that it has nothing to do! The deputies, it is true, by a narrow majority, did not want to bring down the Government. But they were ready to reject the pension reform! And it is the Prime Minister who says it herself: on TF1, she explicitly admitted that she did not have a majority! And this is fundamental. This means that, even in the mind of Emmanuel Macron, this text cannot be legitimate, since it has not received the approval of the elected representatives of the people.
Whichever way we approach the question, we therefore arrive at the same conclusion: it seems to me that the head of state has locked himself into a narrow, if not even flawed, vision of democratic legitimacy. And let’s conclude with the words of Machiavelli, recalled this week by the historian Patrick Boucheron – also a professor at the Collège de France: what is at stake at the moment is not the crowd trying to impose itself to the people. It is the prince, who believes himself wiser and better informed than the multitude.