The idea that we could go back and forth between politics
and "civil society" is the new cream pie.
It blows in these Macronian times an irresistible
dominant wind. A real squall, supposed to sweep away the old political world.
Finite, we are told, the time of the electoral mandate for life, shameless accumulation,
elected cacochymes, politicians bleached under the harness, from the cursus honored
cradle to the grave.
You can be an accountant, lawyer, butcher, journalist, teaching all your life but not woman or a man politician.
You can be an accountant, lawyer, butcher, journalist, teaching all your life but not woman or a man politician.
Bizarre, because it requires at least as much skill as the honorable professions previously cited.
Place therefore to mobility, to the perennial Brownian motion. No more being a politician ad vital aeternam. It will now be necessary to go back and forth with civil society, not to get caught up in a political bubble cut realities. Magnificent! But totally unrealistic. For three reasons.
First reason: this dreamed model exists almost here in
the great democracies.
Take Angela Merkel. She was first elected to the Bundestag in 1991 and has been in the Chancellery for twelve years with a good hope of re-electing a new four-year lease in September. His Minister of Finance, the highly respected Wolfgang Schäuble, has been in the Bundestag since 1972, 47 years!
The "juvenile" Matteo Renzi, president of the Italian Council from 2014 to 2016 after (politically) killing his rival Enrico Letta, entered politics in 1996 and does not seem to want to leave soon.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair at the age of 44 already had a good fifteen years of political life behind him when he crossed the 10-year-old door of 10 Downing Street for ten years.
Stefan Löfven, the Swedish Socialist Prime Minister since 2014, was a union apparatchik for decades. Is it really representative of "civil society"?
In this case, Emmanuel Macron, who has benefited from incredible circumstances and has been able to take advantage of it, is the exception that confirms the rule. And an exception remains, a priori, exceptional, except to imagine that the new president is a sort of prophet, which remains to be demonstrated.
Second reason: the return to "civil life" is generally impossible after a prolonged break. Except for civil servants, who benefit from layoffs with malleable contours? Or for some liberal professions. For ordinary mortals, there is no question of interrupting a professional activity without definitively compromising his career.
Unless, of course, some influential friends who are looked after during your term of office do not find you a job in one of the many welcoming structures available to the Republic and its annexes.
Is it certain that the "casual" politician will be less corrupt than the "professional"? That the going and coming do not go, on the contrary, favor the referrals of elevator, the traffic of influence, to increase the weight of the networks?
Third reason: "civil society" does not exist.
Everyone lives in a "bubble": the politician, the plumber, the writer, the businessman, the farmer, the doctor, the professor, not forgetting, of course, the media world. The essential thing is that these "bubbles" communicate with one another.
The politician receives a delegation from his fellow citizens to watch over the common good. We have inherited from Rome the notion of imperium, the idea that the interests of the State are not only the sum of particular interests, but that there is a historical continuity. Emmanuel Macron seems to have integrated this notion, the rite of his taking office between the coronation of Reims of the kings of France and precisely the Inauguration (investiture augural) of the Roman emperors.
If the limitation of the accumulation of mandates seems effective, that of the duration can always be bypassed by the smart people: we will pass from mayor to deputy, deputy to councilor departmental or regional. Eventually, the positions will be exchanged. What to keep a lifetime ... As in some American states where one can only make two governor mandates and where one tries, after (or before) to become senator or representative. It's a job!
Take Angela Merkel. She was first elected to the Bundestag in 1991 and has been in the Chancellery for twelve years with a good hope of re-electing a new four-year lease in September. His Minister of Finance, the highly respected Wolfgang Schäuble, has been in the Bundestag since 1972, 47 years!
The "juvenile" Matteo Renzi, president of the Italian Council from 2014 to 2016 after (politically) killing his rival Enrico Letta, entered politics in 1996 and does not seem to want to leave soon.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair at the age of 44 already had a good fifteen years of political life behind him when he crossed the 10-year-old door of 10 Downing Street for ten years.
Stefan Löfven, the Swedish Socialist Prime Minister since 2014, was a union apparatchik for decades. Is it really representative of "civil society"?
In this case, Emmanuel Macron, who has benefited from incredible circumstances and has been able to take advantage of it, is the exception that confirms the rule. And an exception remains, a priori, exceptional, except to imagine that the new president is a sort of prophet, which remains to be demonstrated.
Second reason: the return to "civil life" is generally impossible after a prolonged break. Except for civil servants, who benefit from layoffs with malleable contours? Or for some liberal professions. For ordinary mortals, there is no question of interrupting a professional activity without definitively compromising his career.
Unless, of course, some influential friends who are looked after during your term of office do not find you a job in one of the many welcoming structures available to the Republic and its annexes.
Is it certain that the "casual" politician will be less corrupt than the "professional"? That the going and coming do not go, on the contrary, favor the referrals of elevator, the traffic of influence, to increase the weight of the networks?
Third reason: "civil society" does not exist.
Everyone lives in a "bubble": the politician, the plumber, the writer, the businessman, the farmer, the doctor, the professor, not forgetting, of course, the media world. The essential thing is that these "bubbles" communicate with one another.
The politician receives a delegation from his fellow citizens to watch over the common good. We have inherited from Rome the notion of imperium, the idea that the interests of the State are not only the sum of particular interests, but that there is a historical continuity. Emmanuel Macron seems to have integrated this notion, the rite of his taking office between the coronation of Reims of the kings of France and precisely the Inauguration (investiture augural) of the Roman emperors.
If the limitation of the accumulation of mandates seems effective, that of the duration can always be bypassed by the smart people: we will pass from mayor to deputy, deputy to councilor departmental or regional. Eventually, the positions will be exchanged. What to keep a lifetime ... As in some American states where one can only make two governor mandates and where one tries, after (or before) to become senator or representative. It's a job!
Saisi!
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