“I dream of a country where we talk to each other again”, said Michel Rocard in his declaration of general policy, June 29, 1988. The apostle of the second left, appointed to Matignon by François Mitterrand to carry out a policy of openness, was at the time motivated by three considerations. Firstly, his own convictions, inherited from Pierre Mendès France, from the “new society” of Jacques Chaban-Delmas and from the work of intellectuals like Pierre Rosanvallon, advocating a democracy renewed by permanent deliberation between the public authorities, the agents of the State, the elected representatives of the territories, the intermediate bodies and the citizens.
Secondly, the extension of the campaign led by François Mitterrand for his re-election, a campaign of rallying and pacification in the face of the brutality of the Chirac “clans” and the FN. Thirdly, and this was the urgency of the hour, the need to manage a situation of relative majority in the National Assembly, which obliged the Prime Minister to negotiate text by text the majorities of ideas, in the discussion, the concession and compromise, either with the communist group or with the centrists, what the jurist Guy Carcassonne, great negotiator of these alternative agreements, called not without humor “the stereo majority”.
Chat Frenzy
There are obvious similarities between this “Rocard moment” and the current situation. The social demand for deliberation has not ceased to manifest itself in recent years, whether through the success of the “participatory democracy” put forward by Ségolène Royal in her 2007 campaign, at the time of the Nuits Debout in 2016 or the “vests yellow” in 2018-2019. In the meetings of the former presidential candidate, under the Parisian tents or on the roundabouts of forgotten France, it was each time the same frenzy of discussion, debates, a strong desire to find the great moments deliberative of our history, of the clubs of the French Revolution, of 1848 or of the Commune of Paris.
Faced with the temptation of Jupiterian personal power, we have also seen the rebellion of representatives of the territories, associations of mayors, departmental councils and regions, anxious to participate in public co-decision, particularly in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic. On the side of Parliament, it was both the ultra-minority opposition groups and a certain number of deputies of the majority La République en Marche who protested throughout the five-year term against the ultra-presidential practice of rationalized parliamentarism. . Their criticisms, although sometimes caricatural, were nonetheless well-founded.
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