2023-10-11 20:38:51
TRIBUNE – Let’s imagine that a competition jury authorizes certain candidates to take the tests wearing earpieces and with cheat sheets.
What would the lucky winners say? That the competition, since it is open to everyone, is the best thing. And that, since they have been received, they are the best. As they are the best, they will inevitably be right. And, as a result, they will be entitled to enjoy their success in every respect.
This is exactly what is happening with the use that has been made of the election. And that’s exactly what those who benefited from the – let’s use the word – “rigged” elections are saying.
Throughout time, the masters of the game (the jury in our history, the holders of economic power in political life) have ensured that the multitude (the people belonging to the “populace”) cannot play their numbers to try to assert for them what the Americans call the right to happiness.
To do this, the use of the right to vote has always been more or less “rigged”.
And sometimes, we did well.
During the French Revolution, the right to vote was not given to the poor.
In 1992, a few clever people were more subtle by maintaining the right to vote, but excluding from these votes (in treaties that were difficult to modify) everything relating to finance and business. And they have anticipated that these financial circles will do what they want and will be helped to do so. Finally, to close the matter, they created bodies responsible for giving instructions in this regard to national parliamentary assemblies and governments.
In the meantime, we created (in France) a second chamber with assured and reliable conservative recruitment, to cancel texts that were possibly too “red” which could have been voted on by the deputies.
Based on knowledge of electoral sociology, the constituencies were divided (to disadvantage the representation of the “popular masses”).
We have come up with voting methods so that certain candidates come out of the polls and not others.
And then the brain manipulation techniques (1) being more and more sophisticated, we were able to put in the heads of voters (at least enough of them) what was necessary for their hand to put the “ good” ballot in the ballot box. We saw, in a caricatured way, how Macron’s name came out of the polls twice (Ms. Le Pen being “made” as a challenger, then reconverted into a foil between the two rounds).
Those who have benefited from these artifices do not fail to praise democracy since it (perfect on the theoretical level: “Government of the people, by the people, for the people”) functions on the basis of election (perfect, in theory). But the election is “rigged”.
We are amused by the outrageous cries of certain Western and African “elected officials” who vilify, threaten, and work to annihilate those who, like soldiers, have a sense of the State, and dare to imagine the “right happiness for the people. And who overthrow a local head of state. Either stupid, or corrupt, or at the orders of foreign corporations and governments (either a little or a lot of the three depending on the case) which, without the proper electoral process, would not have had access to the command post of the State .
We are amused by the speeches of those who, in our societies, were elected after intense campaigns of manipulation of opinion, and who try to make people believe, as was said above, that the fact that their name came out of the ballot boxes, gave them “legitimacy”. Legitimacy which would extend, according to their speeches, to what they think, say and do (even if it is anything) in the position which is in reality “ill-gotten”…
But what is less amusing is that if we refer to the concept of democracy, the political regime which is practiced by the rigging of the election is not, cannot be, if we ‘sticks to the definition, a democracy.
We could, based in particular on the CVs of many people constituting the political-economic “elite”, call this “organized band government” (2). System in which, as the facts reveal, financiers, senior civil servants, career politicians form networks. Networks within which, after they have pushed some of them into an election, they will be able – thanks to the decision-making power conferred by the election – to organize their affairs for some, the sharing of positions (and the “revolving doors”). “) for the others.
There are obviously remedies. But…
(1) We remember the intervention of Tocqueville who, already in 1848, explained that we could give the right to vote to everyone, because, in any case, “they” will vote “as they are told” .
(2) Expression borrowed… from criminal law.
Marcel-M. Monin is an honorary university lecturer.
#Democracy #organized #group #FranceEvening