Guillaume Bigot: "The abandonment of the sale of ADP is part of a broader paradigm shift"

Guillaume Bigot is Director of IPAG Business School, political scientist and columnist. He is the author of numerous essays and will publish in April Populophobia or the government of the elite, by the elite and for the elite (Plon, 2020).

FIGAROVOX.- The government has decided to suspend the sale of Aéroports de Paris (ADP). It was, however, a project to which Emmanuel Macron had been attached since 2014. Was this a major defeat for him and for the executive?

Guillaume BIGOT.- No, the real debacle could however come from a too timid or too late budgetary reaction from the executive in the face of the Coronavirus crisis. France was fortunate to have two or three weeks of hindsight against Italy and more than a month against China to be able to take the lead and release the billions needed to open posts, order equipment and create additional resuscitation beds.

But, the ideological prism which animated him in the will to privatize ADP also pushed him to close hospital beds and to oppose a categorical refusal to the revalorization of the treatments of the nurses which was however necessary.

The same accounting ideology (displaying more revenue than expense as if the public authorities were a competing company) incites Emmanuel Macron to sell ADP on the double pretext that the State does not have the vocation of managing an airport and must bring in recipes for deleveraging. However, it is heresy from an economic point of view.

First, it is absurd to get rid of a profitable asset that can only increase in value over time.

Then, it is absurd to sell a stock to lighten a flow. It is as if you were selling your apartment which brings you rent to do your shopping or to make ends meet.

Finally, an airport is a strategic asset for security reasons. A country as liberal and commercial as the United States has not even privatized the management of its airports.

The fact remains that the postponement was made inevitable by the stall of the equity markets. Selling an airport when air traffic is divided by ten would have been absurd. On a tactical level, moreover, the postponement of this unpopular measure is very timely before the elections.

However, I believe that Emmanuel Macron should have gone further. In a strong arbitral gesture, to which the constitution, which makes the President of the Republic the guarantor of the unity of all French people beyond parties, invites him, he could have decided, to show that he had heard the opposition of a million citizens and to respect the spirit of its commitment, to organize a referendum on the basis of article 11 or to postpone privatization definitively rather than to postpone it. This decision would have been all the more advised as the particular context of the health crisis and the crash provided him with an excuse not to withdraw completely. Alas, as often with the most illustrious of Walkers, the strategist is overshadowed by the tactician, the party leader erases the head of state.

Is this reversal the sign of a paradigm shift underway? The protests against neoliberal globalization and the demands for the relocation of the economy seem increasingly strong…

Yes, the fact that more than a million French people signed in favor of a referendum against the sale of ADP was a strong signal.

On the bottom, the mobilization against the privatization of ADP showed the convergence of several ideological currents. Beneath the surface of the apparatuses and the apparently frozen media crust, political tectonic plates are moving.

Opponents of the privatization of Aéroports de Paris, whether they are motivated by an opposition in principle to economic liberalism applied in an ideological manner (that is to say, indiscriminate without thinking about the cost / benefit balance) or whether they are inspired by the defense of national sovereignty, all come together to put a stop to market globalization and to a form of “cupitalism” (capitalism boosted by the greed of the financial markets) which has resumed all the more after the subprime mortgage crisis.

On the form taken by this referendum request (through an online petition), we find another original convergence which is another sign of the times.

An ingredient of this political precipitate is offered by the demand for horizontalization of power, what is called in companies, participative management, itself congruent with networking and the intensive use of organized digital tools in rizhome (without center and without head).

In a society increasingly archipelagized to use the fashionable noun, each individual aspires to weigh for himself. This demand for "democratization of democracy" to use Marcel Gauchet's expression is fueled by more negative factors.

I am thinking, for example, of the growing distrust of elected officials and parties. This is reflected, for example, in the request for an RIC as an instrument for permanent a posteriori control of elected officials with the right to rectify their decisions and therefore a kind of right to intervene. The RIC is the start of the revocation mandate.

In this regard, the request for a referendum on the privatization of ADP is in the wake of the Great Jacquerie of peripheral France. However, coincidence of the calendars, the counting of the votes of the citizens most hostile to globalization occurs at the same time as the crash of the coronavirus. March 2020 will therefore remain as the historic moment from which globalization seized up.

The coronavirus crisis has put China (this workshop of the world which weighs 15% of world GDP) on technical unemployment for more than a month. At the same time, the engine driving global growth has stopped. And the price of raw materials began to plummet, causing the stock markets.

The economic and geopolitical rivalry between Moscow and Riyadh exacerbated the fall in prices, the two oil giants flooding the production market, causing a new planetary economic attack, ruining the shale oil sector in the United States.

With these three cascading effects, bat or pangolin soup has become a funny face soup for the global economy.

Let us realize how quickly this virus has spread: the Spanish flu had taken several months to spread, the coronavirus took a few hours to infect people all over the world.

The desire to change the paradigm that animated the opponents of the privatization of ADP has thus become a global health, economic and strategic necessity.

It is no longer ADP that we must refrain from privatizing, it is governments that will have to be renationalized urgently to face the crisis. By cooperating with their counterparts and with the private sector but, this time, by being guided more than by a single spur: the interest of their population.

This is a paradoxical success for the supporters of the shared initiative referendum against privatization. The referendum will never take place (the petition having had only 1 million signatures instead of the 4.7 planned) but the project will not succeed. The rules of the game seemed however written to prevent any referendum, even though the French were overwhelmingly hostile to the project. Are we still in a democracy?

We are still in a representative democracy, even if the representation is more and more limited and with blocked choices. If the vote is favorable, it is taken into account (election of a LREM majority) and it is taken for final (no referendum even if a million citizens request it). If it is unfavorable, it is ignored, as in the case of the infamous 2005 referendum.

What has come to be called the crisis of representativeness against the backdrop of rising populism and mass abstention is above all a crisis in the political offer that has been brewing for decades in France and marks a growing gap between aspirations of a majority of our compatriots, their sensitivity, their collective preferences, their opinions and those of the ruling class.

In this regard, three main lessons can be drawn from the epilogue of this petition.

The first lesson is that it is a Pyrrhic victory for all stakeholders: for the opponents of privatization, despite a titanic effort on the part of intellectuals (we can salute the remarkable work of individuals like Coralie Delaume or David Cayla), associations, activists, elected officials and the million citizens who mobilized, it is a simple postponement of the privatization that is announced.

The constitutional revision aimed at promoting the citizens' initiative is no longer on the agenda. RIP the RIC if you dare say!

For supporters of privatization, Emmanuel Macron at the head, it is impossible to hide the fact that a million citizens have, on their own initiative, opposed this project. It is too little but it is a lot. One million, for example, is the number of votes that separated Emmanuel Macron from Marine Le Pen in the first round. Furthermore, it is required to defeat a law passed by deputies, none of which weighs one million votes, 4.7 million signatures.

The second lesson confirms the diagnosis posed of a crisis in representation and the observation of an offer that is both unsuitable to the demand of public opinion and artificially restricted. It is obvious in the case of opposition to this privatization of ADP that political opinions converge on the ground while they diverge and continue to excommunicate at the level of the staffs. The 250 deputies and senators who started the process belonged to chapels as diverse as environmentalists, Republicans, the Socialist Party or Insubordinate France. Even if this mobilization was not devoid of ulterior motives among some, for many of its elected officials, the desire to defend the common good in the face of the omnipotence of the market was sincere.

However, this one-off fight may say more about the deep convictions of these elected officials (and undoubtedly bring them much closer to each other than to their fellow senators or deputies within their groups or parties) but do not ally them only temporarily and tactically. In addition, if "everything except Macron" could have served as a catalyst for this mobilization, as soon as Marine Le Pen called to support the petition to demand a referendum, it was "everything except the Pen" that took over. .

It is visible to the naked eye that on the issue of the privatization of ADP as in the two referendum campaigns of 1992 and 2005, French democracy is rotting by its head and resumes colors by its base. Macron's aggiornamento in the Europeanist camp lags behind that of the partisans of popular sovereignty. Faced with en Marche, it is time to oppose a Bloch Michelet or a Popular Front capable of uniting by passing over the heads of the parties and without taking into account either the extreme right or the extreme left.

The third lesson is confirmation at the national level that direct democracy is disappointing. When this is implemented in an even more systematic way, by organizing a permanent consultation, the process quickly runs out of steam. These are the conclusions that can be drawn from the cases of local experiments, both in France and abroad, of direct democracy, even relayed by the Internet.

This is explained by a simple reason: deciding implies being informed, but also that citizens absorbed in their daily life do not have time to inform themselves and to deliberate. Let us not forget that in Athens, the citizens were almost idle and devoted most of their time to the affairs of the city.

The dream of reviving democracy through the RIC will therefore remain a fantasy. The more the consultations are multiplied, the more paradoxically there is a risk of undermining the power of the people and their generally silent majority, by increasing that of noisy and active minorities, lobbies of all kinds which can count on a very understandable effect of weariness of public opinion.

Let us not forget that in a democracy, even pure representative (the people decide nothing other than the choice of their representatives), the true and the only absolute and legitimate power is that of the people.

However, there is an old Roman adage which reminds us that we only disturb the chief for really important reasons: " de minimis non curat praetor " ("details, the powerful should not worry").

The privatization of ADP is a minor issue, if we compare it to that of pensions, and itself is secondary if we compare it to the main macroeconomic orientations dictated by our membership of the EU in general and the euro zone in particular.

This does not mean that serious crises must not be resolved (the Franco-Algerian civil war in 1962, the social crisis revealed by May 1968) or that major decisions must be made by the people for the nation (Maastricht 1992 or TCU in 2005).

One can be more royalist than the king, but one cannot be more democratic than the people. In a democracy, there is a need for elected officials to comply with the result of a referendum otherwise one can legally hold power without being legitimate.