Let no one shout, there is an optimistic reading of extreme votes. If some dare, despite the warnings, the reprimands sometimes, why not consider that they do it because they have, above all, an immense faith in our institutions? It is difficult to deny, the Fifth Republic was not founded in a day and its pillars are neither light nor shaky. Solitary rides seem perilous (Emmanuel Macron can testify to this) and the Republic has its safeguards.
Nobody screams, there is a pessimistic reading of extreme votes. Would it be crazy to think that some people venture there precisely because what constitutes the social state, the collective, our institutions in the sense of the structures which allow us to live together, are nothing more than a distant and foggy landscape? School, police, justice… When nothing is up to par, how can it be worse, why would it be worse? The “republican awareness” that political leaders, intellectuals, etc. call for, “the risk of chaos” waved under the noses of voters to distract them from their excesses, what effect for those who in front of their homes no longer see the Republic, or very little?
To the question, do institutions protect against reality, the academician and former State Councilor François Sureau answers: “They aim to civilize it in any case…” Ideal shared but not always observed. Because another phenomenon has appeared: when they remain visible, audible, tangible, institutions are sometimes tinged with vulgarity. Deputies used delusional language in the National Assembly, others expressed indecent ambitions because, at the wrong time, the Elysée appears at this very moment as the scene of a power game between advisors… The process of civilization of political life? In clear decline.
Will political institutions emerge legitimized by this “return to the people”? “This dissolution, far from offering a democratic solution to the deep crisis that our society is going through, opens a little wider a door to violence and chaos that the institutions could have difficulty controlling,” feared Henri Guaino, the former advisor to Nicolas Sarkozy, in Le Figaro from June 20. In what state will the keystone of the system be found? “Emmanuel Macron will never leave,” insist those close to him. But the president must step aside to survive, his longevity has become his fragility, he wants to see in the countdown to his departure proof of his disinterest when his adversaries see it as the beginning of his end. Will the National Assembly which will be born on June 30 and July 7 escape the “fever” and the “disorder” mentioned by the Head of State on the evening of June 9 to justify the dissolution? “This chamber will need a government, whatever happens, that is the only certainty since no dissolution is possible for a year,” they say at the Elysée. When voters are called for “an essential time of clarification”, what happens if it leads to unprecedented obscurity?
© / THE EXPRESS
2024 will also show, in an unexpected way, the consequences of the constitutional revision of 2008, adopted when many thought a new cohabitation impossible and no one believed in the arrival of the extreme right to power. It requires a president to stop after two terms. It also modifies the appointments process. Case study: at the beginning of 2025, the Constitutional Council, which may prove to be an ally of Emmanuel Macron in cohabitation and which the right and the far right regularly target, will see three of its members change, after a renewal decided by the President of the Republic, that of the National Assembly, that of the Senate. These choices will have to be validated by the Law committees of Parliament, which will have a right of veto if a majority of three-fifths of the votes cast opposes the proposed name. Balance of powers or paralysis of the system? Is this how institutions die?
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