The French have never held parliament as an institution in high regard. They see all the outcry over current issues and the empty rows during parliamentary sittings as at best a necessary evil, an archaic concession to the democratic rite. The only real power, which fascinates and around which the whole political debate revolves, the ultimate authority, is the executive, with the Republican monarch at the Elysée at the top and the tutelary figure of the mayor at the base. Assemblies appear needlessly quarrelsome and are seen as talking shops. They represent the ‘political class’, not the citizen. For the French, the real political debate is the one that periodically places power on the street in front of the television cameras. Doesn’t the future belong to direct democracy, with the use of national or local referendums, almost daily surveys and, now, the incredible capacities for exchanging ideas over the Internet and the profusion of blogs?
I don’t think so. Experience shows that the methods of direct democracy, like the aspiration for ‘participative democracy’, represent real progress only when combined with representative democracy. Today’s complex societies can no longer claim to be governed by an omniscient monarch who has the monopoly of inspiration from the Holy Spirit or the best experts. Participative democracy is too easily hijacked by lobbies with specific interests, supposedly apolitical associations, and experts at political manipulation who are experienced in the art of concealing the fact that they are not representative behind the apparent nobility of their cause: the use of the Internet by anti-globalisation campaigners during the referendum campaign shows that it is a medium well suited to the know-how of good old agit-prop of the far left, as is the case elsewhere on the web for religious sectarianism.
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