Background and election rules

What are the particular characteristics of French democracy?

Yves Sintomer: Like all the other European countries, France is a parliamentary democracy, as opposed to having the American presidential system. The specific feature of the French system - which comes to us from the Fifth Republic - is an extremely weak Parliament in comparison with our German, British and Spanish neighbours, in terms of the resources allocated to members of parliament, control of the agenda, the possibility of creating parliamentary committees, the symbolic importance the executive power gives it, law-making mechanisms (parliamentary "shuttle", executive control over bills, etc.). France is also the country with the narrowest recruitment into the highest level of the political class and in which professionalisation is undoubtedly the most advanced.

So the French situation is a paradoxical one: the Fifth Republic, established in1958, was nominally constructed to establish a balance of power, but in practice there is hardly any counterweight to the omnipotence of the executive. The situation has nevertheless improved somewhat in the last thirty years thanks to the increased role of the law: increased power of the Constitutional Council, greater independence of judges.

The emergence of the far right candidate into the second round of the 2002 presidential election, the growth in abstentions, the weakness of trade-unions and political parties: is French democracy in crisis?

In a way, democracy has always been in crisis. It is a system that is constantly called into question. Rather than a crisis of democracy, you might talk about a crisis of legitimacy of the current political system, which manifested itself in the fact that the French Front National candidate, Jean-Marie Le Pen, reached the second round of the presidential election on 21 April 2002. In the first round of this same election, the outgoing president, Jacques Chirac, won only 19.9 % of the votes cast, whilst the candidates of parties with no representative in Parliament obtained a total of 29.6 %.

In 2005, the rejection by referendum of the Treaty of the European Constitution occurred after the 92 % vote on the same Treaty by the Congress [which combines the two parliamentary chambers, the National Assembly and the Senate]. More generally, opinion polls show that trust in political leaders has sunk to an historically low level.

How can we explain this phenomenon?

There is a combination of reasons, which are also to be found at European level: the inability of political leaders to overcome the situation of economic and social crises other than by strategies of inegalitarian growth that hit the working classes particularly; the crisis of traditional public action which is too bureaucratic; the growing professionalisation of politics which tends to cut it off from the energies which might fuel it; a decision-making process increasingly based on governance agreements between States, which tend to reduce the scope for action of the traditional political system.

Finally, just about everywhere in Europe, since the late 19th century and early 20th century the political system has broadly revolved around mass parties (social-democratic parties and Christian-democratic parties for instance) which organised a part of society around them. Today, the parties remain, but they have largely lost the function of mediation which they were able to exercise between civil society and the political system.

To what extent might participatory democracy restore legitimacy to the French political system?

There are two ways to define participatory democracy. The first would involve establishing a dialogue with citizens - which is what elected members used to do at grassroots level - but transposing it on to a different scale (internet, national audience, etc.) and above all, by freeing it from the apparatus of parties. This is what is referred to as "participatory debate".

The second, stricter, definition consists of introducing mechanisms for involving citizens in the decision-making process. This will not stop at local democracy, implemented in France by the Vaillant Law of 2002, providing an organised selective opportunity for citizens to be heard. France is the European champion of local democracy: we have without doubt more district councils than the rest of Europe put together! But the participation of citizens is limited to the micro-local level. Above all, it is an informal practice, because of the French contempt for formal procedures. As a result, it is up to elected members to produce a summary of such discussions, without there being any precise rules of the game, and without being accountable for it.

Participatory democracy, on the other hand, gives real joint decision-making power to citizens, ensuring the establishment of precise rules and obliging leaders to be accountable. The fact of moving away at least partially from the apparatuses and debates internal to the political class is probably one way to rekindle people’s interest in politics. At the same time, there is a risk that this is achieved by taking steps to publicise it, with the candidate in the end making his or her own summary, accentuating the trend towards the concentration of decision-making power in the executive and its charismatic leader.

Participatory democracy could give citizens a kind of power of opposition and help breathe new life into politics, but again it should be applied to sufficiently important issues, and in a sufficiently broad way.

Interview by Jade Lindgaard
Journalist on the arts weekly Les Inrockuptibles

Deputy Director of the Marc Bloch centre (Berlin), Yves Sintomer is also professor of sociology at the Paris VIII University, and researcher at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). He has just published La Peur de la démocratie. Jurys citoyens, tirage au sort et contrôle populaire [Fear of Democracy. Citizens panels, lotteries and popular control] (pub. La Découverte, Paris, 2007).