“This regime under which we have lived for sixty-five years is an anomaly”

2023-04-24 21:00:07

La V^e République now has its place in the obituaries. By validating the text of the law on pensions, the so badly named sages have dealt the last blow to a regime that is out of breath. We must change it, initiate the constituent process for a VI^e Republic. This is the condition of justice and civil peace.

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Today, how to accept that a major law for the daily life of the French, obliging to work two additional years, can be promulgated, while the people do not consent to it? The Constitution allows it, and the president relies on legality to better sweep away any form of legitimacy. Social democracy, given the rejection of the text by all the unions? Trampled. The opinion of the French, overwhelmingly opposed to the government’s project, as well as the anger, even the rage, of millions of demonstrators and strikers? Despised. The vote of the National Assembly? Dodged. Result: in V^e Republic, a president has the right to impose his law against the majority. That is to say that legality cannot be superimposed, intertwined, confused with democracy. It is also to say how much our institutional cogs are unsuited to the aspiration of the people to be sovereign, a republican promise if ever there was one.

Others before me, many on the left, denounced the “permanent coup” which allows the V^e Republic – including, sometimes, unfortunately, before complying with it without complexes. Since the birth of this diet, the worm is in the fruit. The V^e was made by and for a general in time of war, in the context of an insurrectional climate and under the pressure of a coup d’etat by military supporters of Gaullism and opposed to the independence of Algeria. When de Gaulle came to power in 1958, it was in the name of a return to regime stability and to “save the colonial empire” against the “barbarians” that he write a new Constitution, submitted to the French by a referendum which was nothing other than a plebiscite. Exorbitant powers are then conferred on the president, to the detriment of the legislature and direct democracy.

Violence, resentment, insurrection

This regime, under which we have lived for sixty-five years, is an anomaly. By consecrating hyper-presidentialism, it distances us from the necessary sharing of power. No democratic regime knows such a system, giving so much power to one man. Elsewhere, when there is no majority, the decision does not come down to a minority: coalitions are sought.

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