2024-05-09 19:25:43
President Macron’s remarks to the majority parliamentarians, received at the Élysée last March, affirming that “the crowd” of demonstrators opposed to this reform had “no legitimacy” in the face of “the people who express themselves through his elected officials”, earned him harsh criticism from both the left, the right and some of his political allies.
Rarely, in the history of the Fifth Republic, have all the colors of the French political landscape agreed to reject this way of conceiving the practice of power.
+Contempt for social mediation institutions+.
Commentators see, in fact, in these declarations a president “convinced of being the sole holder of political legitimacy” and who no longer hides his “contempt” towards institutional intermediary bodies and social mediation.
By continuing the weakening of these institutions and by forcing passage in the National Assembly on pension reform and many other texts, the Head of State, in his practice of “solitary” power according to the French League of human rights, has caused an unprecedented blockage of the political agenda and a deep democratic crisis, affecting both the real functioning of the institutions of the Republic, social dialogue and citizen confidence.
The result, according to human rights organizations, is a notable decline in public freedoms, particularly with an increase in bans on the right to demonstrate and an increase in violence, which has become a way of expressing oneself in absence of dialogue between the executive and the various intermediary bodies. Situation strongly criticized by the political class, media and intellectuals.
We must face the facts that between the Élysée and civil society, mediation is rare. “Power seems to be exercised from top to bottom, and violence, here and there, replaces meaning and content,” believes, in this regard, sociologist Michel Wieviorka, for whom social mobilizations, yesterday with “ yellow vests”, today on pensions and on the question of water and mega basins, “are increasingly debated from the angle of clashes between law enforcement and protest actors”.
In a fragmented landscape, with a population worried about inflation, exhausted after the health crisis, “the French archipelago is struggling to function and mediation is declining”, he maintains in an analysis published in La Tribune.
“The head of state, since 2017, has embarked on a clear path: power is considered to be exercised from top to bottom, and very few mediations seem to find favor in his eyes,” he adds, recalling that on several occasions, notably during the crisis linked to the pandemic, he decided to subordinate the judicial and legislative powers to the executive to wage the “war” on Covid-19. “In the fight against terrorism, he has also worked to decree exceptional measures, while on social issues, he does not necessarily take into account the unions, including reformist ones like the CFDT – an attitude which is a constant and does not only date from the debate on pension reform”.
+President Macron’s crisis of impotence+.
This propensity to cancel mediations is perceptible in many areas: suppression of the diplomatic corps; casualness towards local or regional elected officials; dynamiting of the left, then of the classic right, lists the sociologist.
The lawyer Benjamin Morel believes, for his part, that some of the French “have the impression that democracy has been confiscated from them”, arguing that the concern is that today, Emmanuel Macron is paradoxically suffering from a ” crisis of impotence”, especially since the major economic issues, which undermine the nation, seem relatively insoluble for him, failing to move beyond the major dominant economic paradigms.
For his part, Pascal Ory, historian and member of the French Academy, describes Emmanuel Macron as a “Jupiterian president, very concerned with lowering the intermediate bodies”.
On pension reform, France, through ”the structurally authoritarian nature of its political culture”, continues to stand out from its neighbors where ”figures of compromise” predominate, says the academician, also professor emeritus at the University of Paris-I-Panthéon-Sorbonne, in a column in Le Monde.
In his eyes, France “continues to stand out from its neighbors through the structurally authoritarian nature of its political culture: centralized and presidential, unitary and bipolarized”.
2024-05-09 19:25:43