The vote on the motion of censure and the resignation of the Barnier government on December 4, 2024 constitute the culmination of a true political revolution in France. With this censorship, almost unprecedented in the history of the Fifth Republic, the polarization of political life has reached a peak.
In a recent Cepremap note, “Parliamentary Fever: this world where we struggle”, we use methods of textual analysis and artificial intelligence to illustrate the metamorphosis of the National Assembly based on an analysis of two million speeches delivered between 2007 and 2024. The old political world, marked by the alternation in power between the left and the right which punctuated parliamentary debates, has given way to the new world. This is characterized by the fragmentation of parties and a very strong polarization of debates in the Assembly since 2017. This polarization has been exacerbated by the irruption of social networks into the lair of our democracy.
Rational debate retreats in the face of emotional rhetoric
Emotional rhetoric has taken hold since 2017, and even more markedly from 2022, while rational debate is in decline, thus diminishing their deliberative character. Today, more than half of speeches are closer to emotional than to
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