France: Between ‘Proximity’ and Participatory Democracy

Abstract

A political uproar created during the Presidential campaign of 2006–07 shows how contested the idea of direct citizen participation is in France, despite the spread of ideas and discourses of citizen participation from the 1980s onwards. On 22 October 2006, Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal proposed introducing randomly elected citizen juries for evaluating public policies. This proposition provoked a wave of protest from all political camps (Sintomer, 2007). Members of the conservative UMP (Union pour la majorité présidentielle), Nicolas Sarkozy included, criticised, for example, the ‘Robespierre’ian orientations of the PS’, recalled the ‘sans-culottes of 1793’, and strongly condemned an ‘exaggeratedly populist’ proposition.¹ Left-wing politicians, too, denounced ‘a demagogy close to populism’, ‘a sort of populism that makes the game of the extreme right’ or asked if this ‘worrying’ proposition was ‘inspired by Le Pen or Mao Zedong’.² These strong reactions can be partly explained by the conflict-ridden context of the electoral campaign, in addition to a political system like the French one that is highly politicised and based on conflict rather than on cooperation or interest mediation. Nonetheless, they also seem to account for a more profound scepticism towards the idea of a direct inclusion of citizens in political affairs, especially when it goes beyond the micro-local level of neighbourhood initiatives. This scepticism is a central element in the traditional French Republican political culture and is one that transcends the right-left division.