TRANSPARENCY

Transparency is a buzzword, and if its connotation is generally positive in the public debate, it is necessary to know what we are talking about.

Before we talk about transparency, it is first necessary to distinguish between public life and private life.

What concerns public life, that is to say in particular the functioning of institutions, naturally intended to be transparent. Citizens-taxpayers have a right to know how their votes and their taxes are, before any consideration of the probity of politicians and state officials.

No one denies that the characters of politics and administration who engage in reprehensible practices are a minority. But the opacity that reigns over all functioning of the institutions casts doubt General thereon. It was this opacity that allowed Agnès Saal case.

Without the revelations of a Duck Chained whistleblower, former director of INA could have continued to use taxpayers' money to fund his extravagant taxi fares. And for good reason: the lack of transparency of the administration allows this type of drift.

If a growing concern for increased transparency is encouraging, it should not be as long as it reaches the opposite result to what is sought. Transparency in public life is a protection of the citizen-taxpayer against the government and administration.

 Conversely, transparency of privacy would be dangerous and potentially totalitarian, precisely because it would make them vulnerable citizens-taxpayers against the state.
And if Jean-Philippe Feldman has not specifically cited the case known as the "Panama Papers", it is to her that he was referring to when he warned against the danger of absolute transparency of business.

Similarly, when the government seizes the theme of transparency, it is usually to require that privacy on the pretext of crime, even terrorism, to justify the surveillance of all of the society.

But in doing so, the government does not apply to itself provide transparency it demands of citizens, as the case of the project "Transparency Law" Finance Minister Michel Sapin demonstrated recently. This is according Sapin to allow the "fight against corruption and transparency in economic life." An association of ideas which suggests that only private economic affairs officers would monitor while the practices of the political class and the administration would they, by nature above all suspicion.

We did our part not expected 2016 to talk about transparency, and that's why, since 2010, we put pressure on parliamentarians to get the transparency of their mandate costs, a fight that has already met with initial success the ban last year parliamentarians to build a property portfolio with their mandate severance costs.

A first victory was won on the very people who’s Michel Sapin, refusing to them the transparency they require citizens.