For around thirty years, the Western world has been confronted with three considerable upheavals: globalization, the digital revolution and climate change, which has suddenly gone from being a distant prospect to becoming an absolute emergency. It is no coincidence that the fall of the Berlin Wall, which historians will take as the starting point of this new era, seems to date back to the dawn of time. Each year that has passed has left the imprint of a decade on our lives.
To use Karl Polanyi’s analytical framework in his masterful work on the industrial revolution [1], these metamorphoses first have the characteristic of being particularly rapid. For Europe, they are also non-native. We are not the originator of any of them. In such a situation, the role of institutions, and of the elite that embodies them, is to support these changes to mitigate their severity, spread their effects over time and allow the most vulnerable to adapt to them.
Institutions never prevent the extremes from accessing power: either the extremes rise there legally, like Philippe Pétain in 1940 or, to a lesser extent, Adolf Hitler in 1933 (Hitler having in fact very quickly established a regime of terror after his appointment as Chancellor of the Reich) [2] ; or they get there by the street, which sweeps everything away in its path. We can observe that it also happens, and this is fortunate, that institutions, including very solid ones, are overthrown by democratic and liberal forces (de Gaulle in 1944 and 1958, the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, the fall of the Soviet regime and its satellite countries at the end of the 1980s).
Institutions can, however, curb the ardour of the extremes once they have come to power. In the event of a victory by the National Rally or the New Popular Front in the next legislative elections, giving one or the other an absolute majority in the National Assembly, the Senate (without which no constitutional reform is possible), the Constitutional Council, the Council of State and the Court of Cassation (which can prevent the adoption or application of laws contrary to our fundamental principles or our international commitments), the independent administrative authorities (which, as their name indicates, do not receive instructions from the executive branch), the European Union (which ensures the primacy of European law over internal standards), all these institutions, each according to its role, will prevent these political forces from implementing the most extreme part of their programme. This is also why, if any political party, even a reasonable one, has the right, and sometimes even the duty, to express its doubts about decisions of institutions, particularly jurisdictional ones, when it considers them inappropriate, it must always remember that those who protect, today, principles that it moderately appreciates are also those who, tomorrow, will defend those that it likes more. For the Republican right, for example: freedom of enterprise, the prohibition of confiscatory taxes, the right to property, freedom of education.
Macron and his “insane decision”
Naturally, the risk is then great that these extreme political currents will accuse the established powers of preventing them from implementing their program. They will make institutions responsible for broken promises. They will curse the divorce between the elite and the people. Reason why the bet of the President of the Republic, if it is the one he wanted to make, to entrust the National Rally with the reins of government to put it to the test and demonstrate its incompetence seems very risky, because the latter will have no problem putting the responsibility for its failures on the backs of the institutions. At the next election, he will propose to reform them in depth.
Institutions must be flexible and strong enough to withstand crises and help public officials in their immensely difficult task of governing, especially in a period like ours. By these standards, those of the Fifth Republic are a model of their kind. They have allowed alternation and cohabitation, states of emergency, short majorities and absences of majority as today. But the Fifth also has a flaw, which is unfortunately not minor: the completely exorbitant concentration of power in the hands of a single man whose election by direct universal suffrage serves as a coronation. The political crisis created by the dissolution will perhaps have the merit of definitively vaccinating us against the myth of the providential man. Because how else can we explain, other than by the deregulation of the ego, made possible by the excessive presidentialization of the regime, that a man as intelligent and cultivated as Emmanuel Macron was able to take such an insane decision alone, in defiance of the authorities he was supposed to consult?
The natural conservatism of institutions protects – temporarily – the people from the excess of extremes. But only the men who lead them can put them in a position to protect the people from reality; this reality which today has the name of the three earthquakes mentioned in the preamble.
However, from many angles, the elite, for thirty years, has used institutions to protect itself when it should have reformed them to protect the people. From the exorbitant salaries of bosses to the refusal of doctors to serve in medical deserts, from the stupidization of children by a digital universe that appeals to adults to the collapse of the school system from which the children of teachers and senior executives escape, from the insecurity that we underestimate in nice neighborhoods to the immigration that we adore because they wash dishes in restaurants, from the people that we stupidize through consumption to the Europe that we beatify without circumspection , without even talking about the political convictions that we abandon to save a constituency or win a morocco, the list is long of the elite’s stratagems to keep institutions in the service of its protection rather than putting them in the service of that of the people . If the republican arc has all the nuances of the rainbow, it also smells of the sulfur of privileges, the scent of which has been carelessly dispersed by the tripartition of political life, desired, encouraged, fanned by the president of the Republic and its subordinates.
[1] Karl Polanyi, The great transformation1944, and, for the French edition, Library of Human Sciences, Gallimard, 1983.
[2] Sebastian Haffner, Story of a German: memories 1914-1933Babel, 2004.
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