The philosopher Pierre-Henri Tavoillot explains that the democratic crisis is less a crisis of representation than a crisis of efficiency. In other words, multiplying citizens’ conventions and inventing national councils at random will not change much in the rise of abstentionism or the spread of the populist disease, because what our fellow citizens expect is not not to speak all the time or to have ministers who look like them like two drops of water, it is that political action produces results. I admit in this case to have been seized with a certain uneasiness on hearing the President of the Republic, during his recent televised speech, promise that, from the start of the school year, the school would be renovated and the hospital emergencies functional. No one can believe it seriously, and that is where the democratic problem lies.
The school and the hospital are two public services for which the State holds all the levers of action. Both the school and the hospital are public, completely independent of the market, employing civil servants under statutory regulations. However, these two institutions are in the process of collapsing. Recall that in the latest edition of the Timss international ranking [NDLR : Trends In Mathematics and Science Study], French pupils in CM1 were ranked last of all European countries, while the 4th were second to last. It is surprising that these results, which mortgage the future of the country, did not arouse more than a vague emotion. As for the hospital, anyone who has visited it recently can testify to a situation unworthy of a developed country. We would also like the Ministry of Health to publish a quarterly dashboard of emergency room waiting times, avoidable deaths, re-hospitalizations… There is here, for once, a serious reason to petition.
The importance of follow-up
The left will tell us that the collapse of public services comes from the fact that the State subservient to the forces of capital is reducing the budgets of education as of the hospital, and managing these public services like companies. It’s absurd. Education expenditure in France is slightly higher than that of OECD countries.
Germany spends less than us, with better results. The President of the Republic was right to announce substantial salary increases for teachers. We will not make this profession more attractive by underpaying it. But the financial question does not exhaust the subject. The president had himself launched the “schools of the future” project in Marseille in September 2021. The aim was to allow establishments to finance innovative projects around culture, languages and science, by giving directors the opportunity to participate in the recruitment of their teaching staff. On paper, this is going in the right direction. But how does this actually happen? How are these projects progressing? When will they be evaluated and generalized? We would like to know. The credibility of democracy dies from the lack of monitoring of public policies.
Too much dogmatism vis-à-vis the private
As for annual hospital expenditure, it exceeded 100 billion euros. The truth is that the hospital has money and beds, but the rigidity of its organization and the internal squabbles prevent them from being used rationally. Thus, many hospitals have a large number of beds for the “specialty” sectors, while, in the same building, the emergencies are starving. Often, it would be enough to fix things to reorganize schedules and coordinate hospitals in the same living area. But no: rather to pour money blindly, which allows to bring down the union and media pressure for a few days.
Making empty promises about the improvement of our public services accentuates the democratic crisis because everyone can see, in their personal lives, that these announcements are not followed up. Under these conditions, why vote? Our public services must be the object of a serious work of refoundation which must not be limited to the means but to take into account the organization and the cooperation with the private sector. Why put, for example, so many spokes in the wheels of private clinics when they want to open an emergency service, if it is not pure dogmatism?