Abstention in regional elections: "The essential responsibility lies with the ruling class of the country"

A keen observer of French political life and regular contributor to the FigaroVox, Maxime Tandonnet has notably published André Tardieu.

The misunderstood (Perrin, 2019).

Abstention from regional and departmental polls breaks all records on June 20, 2021. Comments about a low turnout become a habit at the end of each vote. Less than 50% in the legislative elections of 2017 and the Europeans of 2019, 40% in the municipal elections of June 2020. This time, the collapse is characterized (27% at 5 pm, 32% at the end of the ballot according to a IFOP estimate).

This collapse is obviously the sign of a dying democracy. As soon as the vast majority of citizens abstain from going to the polls, universal suffrage is annihilated and the power of the people becomes an empty formula. This situation is immensely dangerous. Nature abhors a vacuum: if the people shirk their duty, others will take their place. The neutralization of universal suffrage opens the way to dictatorship of offices or courts or to the coming to power of any charlatan or despot escaping all control.

Indeed, the primary responsibility for this situation lies with the country's ruling class. In recent years, the sinking of politics at the highest level in the blows of communication, the permanent Grand-Guignol, the obsession to appear and to show off has ended up generating a deep disgust among citizens. Popularity polls that measure immediate emotion don't necessarily reflect that disgust in all its depth. However, this is reflected in the miserable participation rates in the following elections. And the degraded image of politics is general, without the French making a distinction between the national and territorial level.

This gigantic abstention rate reflects above all that the French have largely internalized the idea that all majorities and all governments are equal.

Maxime Tandonnet

Added to this is the tragic observation that the country's leaders, who take so long to show off in front of television cameras to be re-elected, are fundamentally incapable of resolving the major subjects of concern of the French: unemployment that affects 4 to 6 million of people, a vertiginous collapse of the educational level, a poverty which affects nearly 10 million people according to the INSEE, the problems of violence and delinquency which gnaw especially the working classes, the concerns around the control of migration and a debt of 120% of GDP. Added to this are the conditions for dealing with the health crisis and the damage caused by a year of “Absurdistan”, which beyond the self-satisfaction of the ruling class, the French are not about to forget ...

This gigantic abstention rate reflects above all that the French have largely internalized the idea that all majorities and all governments are equal. It is in part the fruit of the “new world” resulting from 2017, based on the exaltation of the occupant of the Élysée Palace at the cost of the weakening of the right / left divide, of a confusion which blurs the traditional benchmarks of politics around a face-to-face meeting between a ruling majority and an opposition. In the midst of this fog - intentionally fueled - the belief that there is no credible alternative is now widespread. For a vast majority of French people, political life has now become a sham and voting is absolutely useless.

Abstentionism also reflects a collective renunciation of exercising one's right which is not to the credit of a vast majority.

Maxime Tandonnet

And besides, the electoral maneuvers in PACA - the rallying of LREM to the LR list - highly publicized took on an emblematic connotation of these regions and of democratic life in general.

Here again, those responsible for this cynical operation surely did not measure the symbolic significance of their gesture.

It will have been felt by many French people as a sign that the political class, or part of it, is capable of all arrangements to keep its prebends.

What can be worth, in the eyes of the citizens, a policy dedicated to the only opportunism and devoid of all conviction?

Finally, the people also have a certain share of responsibility. Abstention or blank voting may have a justification when voters are faced with a binary alternative, a choice "between plague and cholera" or felt as such. However, in the first round of regional and departmental, this is obviously not the case given the profusion of lists. The behavior of the ruling class and part of the political leaders of this country does not excuse everything. Abstention certainly reflects a political despair for which there are certainly good reasons, but it also reflects a collective renunciation of exercising one's right which is not to the honor of a vast majority.