Chloé Morin was opinion advisor to the Prime Minister from 2012 to 2017. She is currently working as an associate expert at the Jean Jaurès Foundation.
Once again, the whole of France will have held its breath, watched for the white smoke from the "defense council", the beating heart of what remains of our democracy.
Once again, the President is going to introduce himself to the French, with a solemnity that borrows from this monarchical imagination that we are definitely not able to get rid of.
We fear, unfortunately, to know the rest of the film ...
The latest events reveal a health and economic tragedy, not to mention a social catastrophe that is brewing in the country - and of course, a terrorist risk which puts everyone's nerves to the test.
But, and we say it too little, they are also the revealer of a major democratic crisis, the fruit of a dysfunction of rare intensity of the institutions.
They had been planned to organize the sharing of power, to counterbalance the excesses of the Fourth Republic, but now organize the unprecedented capture of power by the President of the Republic alone followed by a caporized majority.
It is democracy, in the sense of transparent deliberation, that is set aside.
Astonishment, astonishment and fear can all contribute to our collective deprivation of perspective.
However, it is important to understand what we are going through: for more than six months, now, we accept that a handful of men can decide to lock up an entire country, to close businesses, to separate families, and in the name of health (a just cause that there is absolutely no question of challenging here) without real parliamentary debate, without real checks and balances.
These often act only at the margins, to censor such and such a provision of law, or such prefectural decree.
Many jurists see the principles that were thought to be solid fade away in the face of the trivialization of the exception and the measures infringing public freedoms ... for our security.
It is democracy, in the sense of transparent deliberation, that is set aside.
Tuesday evening, all party leaders were thus consulted, but their collective confessions nothing concrete was told to them.
Worse, they were not asked to comment on the various options considered ... The sovereign president will not decide high above the parties but by putting them aside, as if they did not represent anything.
And in the wake of the presidential announcements, it is like one man that a hyper-dominant parliamentary majority will validate the choice made the day before by the President.
There is no question here of initiating an illegitimate trial of the President of the Republic.
Elections, weakened as they are by growing abstention, are still the only way to delegate popular sovereignty and to organize a form of government which has been known since Churchill to be the
"worst, except of all the others ”
.
Emmanuel Macron enrolled in institutions.
Until the absurdity and the absolute isolation that they can cause.
But is all this reasonable?
In what type of human community could one be satisfied with placing so much power in the hands of one - or a handful of representatives?
How can we accept that the ability to debate, challenge, be informed, does not depend only and exclusively on the will of those who hold power, and make the decisions?
It is obvious that in such circumstances, it is not in the interest of the executive to share all the information on the causes and consequences of its actions, since the latter could contribute to questioning it politically ( without even going into the legal field, which is developing more and more because of the inability of the political sphere to regulate itself and to establish and sanction each other's responsibilities).
We are in the process of accepting that our democracy is increasingly dysfunctional.
Out of amazement, out of democratic apathy, through the collapse of what is the exercise of full citizenship, through ignorance of the spirit and the functioning of our institutions, we are accepting that our democracy is still dysfunctional. more.
It is true that our consciences and our nerves were already severely strained by the terrorist attacks.
No concession can ever seem too great to someone who seeks to save his life and protect his family.
Resisting this primary instinct, overcoming the instinct for survival thanks to the decline of reason, is a capacity that we have conquered over the centuries, torn from our animality.
But the consequences of the second confinement which extends before us should lead us, if not to a civic and democratic leap, at least to deep questions.
Starting with what we expect from power, its organization, and the role of each in its exercise.
Out of breath, the Fifth Republic is putting into practice Montesquieu's famous sentence through the practices that are developing:
“When, in the same person, the legislative power is united with the executive power, there is no no freedom ”.
When will we finally get out of our “monarchist” and “absolutist” conception of power, which is only a way of making positive our unhealthy fascination with “strong men”?
Electoral cycles follow one another and look alike, at a speed that gets carried away: we project all our hopes into a man (or a woman, although this remains theoretical to this day), bring him to power by ceding all powers to him. that he wishes - if he put the abolition of Parliament on the program "to be more efficient", there is no doubt that we would accept, moreover is not this what we had already almost accepted with the drastic reduction in the Parliamentarians promised by Macron? ... Then, just a few months after bringing him to the top of power, we throw him away.
We suddenly decide that he was not "effective", that he even betrayed - and on purpose!
- and let us attribute to him the responsibility for the political failures of the last twenty years - and, icing on the cake, bad faith never hurting, make him bear the weight of our individual cowardice, small and large.
Thus, Emmanuel Macron has seen himself for a few days accused of being responsible for terrorism in France, where any somewhat reasonable mind knows that he is only the end of the chain of collective bankruptcy.
This virus is demonstrating through absurdity, and even tragedy, that our institutions can no longer rest on a few shoulders - however solid they may be - extremely serious decisions, which involve more than individual lives, survival. of the whole nation.
It is not the scene of defense councils which follow one another in general opacity by revealing only the staging of helplessness and loneliness, ineffective, which will prove their resilience.
Economic collapse awaits us, moral depression even more.
Perhaps the time has finally come - but is there still time?
- to establish other ways of deciding and doing together.