“The Dangers of Macronism: An Authoritarian Neoliberalism Threatening French Democracy”

Sf the ideological identification of macronism remains subject to debate, the government spokesperson helped to reveal some [le 19 avril] the matrix through the expression of a syncretic formula – “work, order, progress” – supposed to guide the action of the executive.

This triptych is nothing other than the motto of the power in place. However, although equivocal, this conveys a rhetoric whose symbolic charge can prove dangerous for the “Democratic and Social Republic” (art. 1^is of the Constitution) and its motto, “liberty, equality, fraternity”. A danger embodied by an authoritarian neoliberalism, the advent of which would consecrate the definitive failure of the republican promise.

The principle of separation of powers was conceived by Locke (1632-1704) and Montesquieu (1689-1755) as an institutional technique intended to guarantee freedom. In this, the drift of a regime marked by the hyper-concentration of power constitutes a threat to our freedoms. Behind the caricature of the figure of the omniscient and omnipotent republican monarch, emerges a pyramidal conception of democracy.

Distrust

The executive does not hesitate to use its exorbitant prerogatives (of which article 49.3 of the Constitution has become the symbol) to neutralize the parliamentary and popular will. Not only does the arbitration of the sovereign people seem inconceivable, but when citizens express themselves (including in the official framework of the great debate, the citizens’ convention for the climate, etc.) or demonstrate en masse, their words have no little value.

The government’s mistrust of parliamentary and social democracy is also reflected in a difficulty in conceiving the very principle of contestation, criticism and contradiction.

Intermediary bodies have the feeling of being despised, while associations for the defense of human rights (from Amnesty International to the League for Human Rights) face attacks because of their very function of counter-power. Attacks at the heart of an authoritarian discourse, which tends to reduce the field of exercise of freedoms (of association, expression, demonstration, etc.) and to undermine the liberal principle according to which “freedom is the rule, restriction or prohibition the exception”.

This new order values ​​the figures of the forces of order, embodied by the prefect and the policeman, while castigating the chimeras “Islamo-leftists”, “wokists” or “eco-terrorists”. Far from being anecdotal, the ad nauseam invocation of these rhetorical formulas aims to disqualify citizens reduced to enemies of the Republic, to better maintain a culture of denial of injustice.

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