“The repression of associations constitutes the ultimate facet of an assumed post-democratic contempt”

2023-04-20 08:00:05

Lhe government’s response to the social and political crisis has reached a new milestone. In his hearing before the Senate on April 5, the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, once again broadened the scope of targets of repression. After the “breakers” d’« ultragauche » and part of the parliamentary opposition, it is now up to the League for Human Rights (LDH) to the object of threats − in this case of cuts to subsidies. The Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, followed suit a week later by denouncing the “ambiguities” from the Association ” in front of radical Islamism.

The designation of new targets simultaneously corresponds to an extension of the forms of repression: symbolic repression by assimilating part of the opposition to “terrorists” intellectuals; then physical and police repression, using techniques to maintain order in the demonstrations against the pension reform and the mega-basins which led to many serious injuries and an alarming number of unjustified arrests and police custody.

Judicial repression also, judging by the hundreds of immediate appearances of demonstrators. Administrative repression too, with the launch of a procedure to dissolve the Uprisings of the Earth following the mobilization in Sainte-Soline (Deux-Sèvres). And now, in the case of the LDH, financial repression. The political sequence that has unfolded before our eyes in recent weeks has thus come to embody the repressive continuum documented by the Observatory of freedoms of association for more than three years.

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Indeed, repression is not limited to the techniques of maintaining order and police violence. It is often insidious, contributing to making engagement more costly and risky. Attacks on civil society have multiplied since 2015, in particular with the entry into common law of measures intended to combat terrorism.

The proliferation of administrative dissolutions of associations indicates in particular that this measure – initially thought of as exceptional because it was the most coercive tool with regard to civil society – has become a routine instrument for regulating relations between the State and associations. The “separatism” law of 2021 came to offer a more solid legal framework to these institutional practices, widening the possibilities of dissolution and institutionalizing the distrust of associations by the establishment of the republican contract of engagement, denounced by all main representatives of the associative world.

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