Lthe current political crisis “dear old country” General de Gaulle’s election will have had a first unpleasant consequence, that of resurrecting words that had until then happily disappeared from the national vocabulary, such as “proportional”, “coalition”, “parliamentarianism”, and even the most incomprehensible of all: “social democracy”. Obviously, the surprise would have been less great if the French had been a little more historians and totally geographers. They would then have discovered that all the border countries – and, beyond that, all the liberal democracies of Western Europe – had chosen the same political system – parliamentary and coalitionist -, the opposite of ours. In other words, they would have discovered that they were, in the etymological sense, “abnormal”, a finding that would not have failed to flatter this well-born people.
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This is why the spectacle of a head of state deciding to dissolve the National Assembly without real “consultation” – another incomprehensible word – was enough to trouble our neighbors, while any of our scholars familiar with the 19th centurye century knew from a reliable source that this country had successively invented, for its greater 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 suffrage in question. This political imagination arouses, it must be recognized, admiration.
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But isn’t it that today, some lunatics seem to think that the solution would be to make us resemble our neighbors? 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 calendar of legislative and presidential elections; the rebalancing of the respective powers of the President of the Republic, the Prime Minister and Parliament.
Sly reasoning
They fortunately forgot one last trick – I am afraid to mention it, for fear of giving some people the wrong ideas: correcting the voting method in the second round of the presidential election, so that not only the two leading candidates can run, but also all those who have obtained a minimum proportion of votes in the first round, to be defined.
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