lThe current political crisis of “dear old country” General de Gaulle’s first unpleasant consequence was that of resurrecting words that had fortunately disappeared from the national vocabulary until then, such as “proportional”, “coalimentarism”, “parliamentarism” and even the most incomprehensible of all: “social democracy”. Obviously, the surprise would have been less if the French had been a little more historical and totally geographical. They would then have discovered that all the bordering countries – and, beyond that, all the liberal democracies of Western Europe – had chosen the same political system – parliamentary and coalitionist – as opposed to ours. In other words, they would have discovered that they were, in the etymological sense, “normal”, an observation that would not fail to flatter these well-born people.
That is why the spectacle of a head of state deciding to dissolve the National Assembly without a real “consultation” – another incomprehensible word – was enough to disturb our neighbours, while any of our scholars familiar with the 19th centurymy century, I knew from reliable sources that this country had successively invented, for its own glory, modern authoritarian democracy (in 1799, under the name of Napoleon Bonaparte), the election of the President of the Republic by universal suffrage (in 1848, under the name of his nephew, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte) and, to finish in style, in 1851, the illegal dissolution of the National Assembly by the president in question, in the name of the vote in question. This political imagination arouses, one must admit, admiration.
But doesn’t it seem that today some enlightened people seem to think that the solution would be to make us look like our neighbours? And we see a series of chilling reforms looming on the horizon: the extension of proportional voting to legislative and local elections; the reversal of the legislative and presidential calendar; the rebalancing of the respective powers of the President of the Republic, the Prime Minister and Parliament.
furtive reasoning
Fortunately, they forgot one last plan, which I am afraid to talk about for fear of giving some people bad ideas: to correct the voting method in the second round of the presidential elections, so that no one can put forward only the two candidates who came first, but also all those who would have obtained a minimum proportion of votes in the first round, to be defined.
You have 47.17% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
