2024-10-18 10:16:00
“We willingly consider, in France, the voting method as a secondary mechanism (…). It is a mistake, a serious mistake (…). it makes democracy or it kills it.”
To situate the problems, I deliberately underline this statement by Michel Debré, resolute opponent of proportional representation, published in “The Death of the Republican State” in 1947, an era that we thought was over, but which has now returned, that of the party regime .
It is without pleasure, but with certainty, that I speak here with Michel Barnier, Prime Minister at the helm of a very sick, if not moribund, State.
Without pleasure, first of all because I perfectly remember the years from 1968 to 1972, when Michel Barnier and I participated in the national meetings of the Union des Jeunes pour le Progrès, the young Gaullist movement. Michel Barnier sat there as departmental delegate of Savoy. For my part, I represented the Vendée, where I had established the departmental section of the UJP.
Without pleasure, so why did I not imagine, in April 1985, which will soon be 40 years ago, creating the Association for a referendum on the electoral law, to “fight the establishment of proportional representation” by François Mitterrand and to “guarantee the defense of the institutions of the Fifth Republic“, that one day I would have to bring the contradiction to a man of Gaullist origins.
But I also pick up the pen with certainty. The certainty that I owe to friends – many of whom are no longer alive – who were kind enough to place their trust in me and accompany me in this action. The certainty also of waging the good fight for a certain idea of the Republic and of France. A Republic wanted by De Gaulle and approved by the French people in two solemn referendums in 1958 and 1962. A France that General de Gaulle’s disciples can only consider exemplary, and we are more than far from it, on the brink of the abyss.
AGAINST THE ABANDONMENT OF THE REFERENDUM
In “Le Quotidien de Paris”, Philippe Tesson’s newspaper, on Tuesday 9 April 1985 – readers will forgive me if I quote myself – I wrote in particular: “For almost three years, in the newspapers that have been so kind to me they open their columns, I sow the idea and support the cause of a referendum on the electoral law, which would allow the President of the Republic to pose the question of confidence and the French people to resolve, with certainty and unequivocally, the great controversy on legitimacy.
“It is a question of restoring, through the electoral law, for the misfortune of France, the party regime that the French formally condemned by adopting, at the appeal of General de Gaulle and through a referendum, the Constitution of 1958. Proportional representation – in small doses, in medium doses or in large doses – is completely incompatible with the spirit of the Fifth Republic. It can only generate “a Parliament without faith or hope, governments without soul or credit”.
In his general policy speech of October 1, Michel Barnier, mistaking rhubarb for senna, and trying to avoid his government’s censorship by making promises in a patchwork-like exercise (one piece for the unhappy Macronists, one piece for the happy republicans, a piece for the dissatisfied of the National Rally), declared without any ambiguity: “I have heard the requests for greater representativeness. I am ready, as is the government, for reflection and action without ideology regarding the vote proportional representation, which already exists in the Senate and in the communities and which many of our neighbors practice to varying degrees.
In addition to the fact that the method of election of senators and local elected officials has absolutely no relationship and no impact on the formation of the majority in the National Assembly, which is essential for the proper functioning of our institutions, what happens among “our neighbors” is not necessarily the best criterion for evaluating the method of electing our deputies. We also know that their system favors post-election combinations, “behind the back of the voter” who on election night does not know who will govern the next day. In short, it is not the voters who decide, it is the party leaders, after interminable negotiations, who “calculate the coalition that seems best to them”, I borrow these words from Michel Debré.
If the prime minister doubts it, even if he has to face the political contingencies that were those of the presidents of the Council of the Third and Fourth Republic, Michel Barnier obviously cannot ignore that it is he who leads the country’s politics (and not only!) in a context opposite to that of the foundations of the Fifth Republic: a president, a government and a majority in Palazzo Borbone of the same political color.
1985: Michel BARNIER OPPOSES PROPORTIONAL
Having participated, almost 40 years ago, in the fight against the introduction of proportional representation into our constitutional law, I remember the action carried out by the RPR group of the National Assembly, of which Michel Barnier was a member at the time.
On 24 April 1985, in its 2nd session, the National Assembly had the following agenda: “Method of election of deputies – Motion to propose to submit the bill to a referendum”.
In this motion, approved by Michel Barnier – and the deputy from Savoy was not necessarily an “ideologue”, as he says today – we read the following:
“Majority voting has been and remains one of the essential conditions for the proper functioning of the institutions of the Republic.
«The majority vote alone has the virtue of favoring the formation of parliamentary majorities before the elections and of favoring their maintenance and cohesion after the elections, the dissolution of which loses its effectiveness when the vote is not a majority, as demonstrated by the examples of democracies close to ours.
“The spirit of our institutions requires us to ask the sovereign people to decide for themselves the method of appointing deputies, just as they decided, in October 1962, at the request of General de Gaulle, on the method of electing the President of the Republic.
Called to defend this referendum motion written by Jean Foyer, associate professor of public law and former Minister of Justice under General de Gaulle, Michel Debré, one of the founding fathers of the Fifth Republic and first tenant of the Hôtel de Matignon under De Gaulle – has first insisted on the “capital innovation of the referendum”:
“The appeal to a clear decision by the people, considered a living expression of the Nation, has become the supreme institution of the Republic. In 1958, the introduction of the referendum is part of a new conception of the Republic which no longer exists, as in the previous Constitution, a general and total delegation during the mandate to the elected members of the National Assembly. The elected representatives must respect the sovereign that the referendum allows the President of the Republic to decide; solemnly the most serious decisions.
Then speaking about proportional representation, Michel Debré refers to his experience of the Fourth Republic of which he was a tireless killer:
“The National Assembly will become an addition of minorities. The government, instead of being supported by a majority resulting from the will of the electorate, will necessarily be linked to a combined coalition, sometimes provisional, the day after the elections, and to a small the minority can become arbiter The change is profound (…). It is therefore a mistake to say that the electoral law will not change the functioning of the regime.
“The objective appears clear to the most blind: it is a question of returning to the regime of the parties. The parties will nominate the candidates, the parties will nominate the ministers (…). It is the return of France to the regime of the assembly, that is, the regime of parties that caused the death of the Republics”.
2024: THE FIFTH REPUBLIC IN DANGER OF DEATH
Certainly, under Macron’s presidency, and for the first time in more than 60 years, majority voting did not produce a majority in the National Assembly. But this situation is not without analogies with the legislative elections of 1951 in which, to prevent De Gaulle’s return to power, the politicians of the time – it was De Gaulle who said this in Bourges on 25 February 1951 – “agreed to seek maneuvers that would allow the minority they represent in the country, even if they all came together, to be the majority in the Chamber. We also see that the government that bears the name of the Republic takes into account the similarity of the lists and that of the remaining ones, i.e. a fraud which would add up the opposing votes and get elected with votes he didn’t have.
From the electoral law on kinship of 1951 to the shenanigans of all kinds between the two rounds of the 2024 legislative elections, the only difference is the thickness of the sheet of cigarette paper…
Commenting on this unprecedented political situation since 1958, Jean-Éric Schoettl, former secretary general of the Constitutional Council, writes not without reason in “Le Figaro” of 12 September: “The establishment of proportional representation would be the last nail in the coffin of the Fifth Republic”.
In his general political speech on 1 October, Michel Barnier confided to national deputies that he had “a certain idea of the institutions”.
If this “certain idea” is that of the Gallian Fifth Republic, it is precisely the moment to show it, and also to demonstrate it, remembering that, according to General de Gaulle, the voting method must “help, in a nation as divided as ours , to the grouping of opinions”, when the proportional system methodically organizes their dispersion. Having thus chosen the majority vote in 1947, De Gaulle stuck to it until the evening of his life, writing his Memoirs of Hope. If the Prime Minister doubts this, I refer him to my study on “The founders of the Fifth Republic and the voting method”, published in the “Revue des deux mondes” on 24 September 2018.
It is also the time to remember that, under the Fifth Republic, the head of state cannot remain in power without the trust of the people, verified through elections (especially if they follow the dissolution of the National Assembly) or through referendums. Michel Barnier knows like me that in Emmanuel Macron’s place, General de Gaulle would have already left.
Without a doubt, the fate of the institutions of the Fifth Republic is better than the fate of a ministry that has all the credentials for a provisional government.
It is not up to a Gaullist to deliver the final blow to the Fifth Republic and sign its death certificate.
Alain Tranchant, founding president of the Association for the referendum on the electoral law
#Michel #Barnier #liquidator #Republic