21.08.2024, reflection on parliamentary separatism and the homogeneity of parliament

 

Marc SALOMONE / marcsalomone@sfr.fr

Blog: madic50.blogspot.com / Book: Les deux Formes, ed. Amazon.

Paris, Wednesday, August 21, 2024

REFLECTION ON PARLIAMENTARY SEPARATISM AND THE HOMOGENEITY OF PARLIAMENT

During the legislative elections of June 30 and July 7, 2024, in accordance with art. 4 of the constitution, the political parties competed for the expression of universal suffrage.

They led the votes of the electors according to strategies of confrontations, exclusions, identity alliances.

This is how groupings were formed, occasional or not, informal or not, such as the "New Popular Front", "the Republican Arc", "barrages aux blocs des extrêmes", "Front républicain", etc.

An essential part of the campaign was based on the ever-renewed definition of the "Center of Government" and the "two extremes" to be excluded.

The results are what they are, the People have spoken.

As is self-evident, the political groups of the National Assembly (AN) are trying to organize its operation on the electoral logic of the parties, that of the Center of Government and the "two extremes" to be excluded.

The characteristic of the operation of this logic is that no party, nor any parliamentary group, has escaped the qualification of "extreme" (not even the center), the "exclusion" of the "republican arc", being the target of a "barrage", etc.

The acquisition of centrist purity is a fight worthy of those revolving surfaces of funfairs that take the participants out of the game, one after the other, by unbalancing them.

The impossibility of appointing a Prime Minister capable of forming a stable government is expressly a consequence of this logic.

Indeed, since the excluded groups have the means to add their votes to the motions of censure of the inclusive groups against their inclusive adversaries, no government can hold.

The National Assembly cannot therefore function in this way.

The first task of the National Assembly is to form a majority that makes it possible to form a stable government.

A management of the Assembly based on exclusions, or stable organic oppositions, presupposes the existence of a constant coalition of minorities forming precarious but continuous majorities.

This is also why the political poles of the National Assembly think they can recreate the "third force" of the Fourth Republic or renew the "Republican Fronts" which have ensured since July 17, 1984 the renewal of the alternation of the Socialist Party and the right wing "UMP", for more than forty years, better known by the nickname "UMPS".

The Fourth Republic ended in a military coup (whose unpredictability it would be desirable to study).

The UMPS and its centrist continuity have bankrupted France on all official indicators to measure it.

The novelty is that it is not possible to form a majority or to overthrow the regime that organizes the institutions.

It therefore appears that the electoral policy based on the definition of camps to exclude and camps to include, the logic of an active center and two excluded extremes, when applied, as a norm, an obvious fact, to the functioning of the National Assembly now makes it unmanageable and prohibits the formation of a government.

What is preventing the appointment of a Prime Minister and the formation of a stable government is not so much the tripartite division of the National Assembly groups as the inclusion of each of these groups and groupings of groups in a policy of a priori exclusion of other groups. A silent separatism.

Political groups cannot shift the responsibility for the inability of some to form a government to the President of the Republic.

It would be easy for him to appoint a Prime Minister cited by any of the parliamentary groups and thus demonstrate that none of these appointments is capable of passing the first vote of a motion of censure.

We must therefore proceed differently.

Let us refer to the Constitution:

Art. 3:

National sovereignty belongs to the people who exercise it through their representatives and by way of referendum.

No section of the people or any individual may claim to exercise it.

Art. 4:

Political parties and groups contribute to the expression of suffrage. They are formed and exercise their activity freely. They must respect the principles of national sovereignty and democracy.

They contribute to the implementation of the principle set out in the second paragraph of Article 1 under the conditions determined by law.

The law guarantees pluralistic expressions of opinions and the equitable participation of political parties and groups in the democratic life of the Nation.

Let us start from these principles.

There are no groups in the National Assembly or the Senate that are statutorily excluded, nor any functioning of these assemblies that can be based on their exclusion.

The National Assembly and the Senate must be considered as organically homogeneous assemblies.

Voters constitute a homogeneous parliament by installing elected representatives who form groups and coalitions of minority or majority groups, but none of whom can claim greater legitimacy than the others and no elected representative can establish a separation from other elected representatives who would be deemed incapable of participating in a vote or in a function in the assembly.

The groups must renounce prohibiting any of them from accessing any function whatsoever on principle.

The only criteria for accession to internal responsibilities in the Assemblies are the capacity of the elected representatives and the proportionality of the elected representatives between each group.

A majority policy cannot be a separatist coup, even a clever one, against democracy.

The situation is made very difficult by the current distribution of positions due to a principle of exclusion of this or that group from the functional bodies of the National Assembly.

It is necessary to be capable of either adapting the structures thus formed to the homogeneity of the National Assembly or of redoing these elections.

As a result, the votes are distributed according to the assessments made of the candidate personalities or the texts presented and not because of a principle of exclusion.

President Georges Pompidou said of the Constitution of the Fifth Republic that it was a "stupid", a mixture of several constitutional filiations; parliamentary and presidential.

Parliamentarians would be wrong to believe that the good people will follow them in a parliamentary revolt, as there were in the past, against the Executive Power, embodied today by the President of the Republic.

This one is elected as well as they are and in the eyes of the French it is a guarantee for a continuity and a unity of the State that the elected supporters of the exclusion of various of their peers, according to criteria that are clearly variable and opportunistic, are visibly struggling to ensure.

The detractors of the elected Presidency, in the name of the adoration of parliamentarianism, should pay attention to the secular experience that the French have of the action of parliamentarians.

They do not want the dictatorship of either one.

They also know that today the constitutional third power is that of the European Union and that they cannot face it in separatism but through homogeneous institutions.

It is up to the elected representatives and political groups to define and implement the paths of national unity. One cannot replace the other.

The parties cannot be reduced to being the sounding boards of the elected representatives. These are not limited to being the spokespersons of their parties in the Assemblies.

The elected representatives will not be able to trace this path by developing within the organs of the Legislative Power a strategy of exclusion, of separation, which only guarantees the impossibility of forming a government.

They are responsible for the functioning of Parliament. They cannot base it on a clever redefinition of the results of universal suffrage. They must work with these results.

The first act of abandoning the policy of exclusion is a declaration of homogeneity formulated by all the groups together.

The French do not ask parliamentarians to watch their language but to ensure their homogeneity, respect for the decisions of universal suffrage and Democracy.

Marc SALOMONE