In his new book, the lawyer details the constitutional reforms he deems necessary to respond to democratic discomfort.
Collected by Claire Legros
Professor of Constitutional Law, Dominique Rousseau, Author of Six Theses for Democracy Continuing (Odile Jacob, 176 pages, 14.90 euros) proposes, among other things, to deliberate citizens on proposals and bills before their discussion In Parliament.
As we are prepared to elect our representatives by universal suffrage, you write that the citizen is the great absent of contemporary political forms. Is not it paradoxical?
This idea may seem paradoxical if one thinks that the citizen is realized in the figure of the elector. However, the elector does not define democracy but the electoral form. We are at the end of a cycle, that of a representative democracy thought at the end of the eighteenth century, which recognizes the citizen that the competence to elect representatives who will want to him. Another cycle opens. It is mainly the normative competence of citizens, that is to say, their ability to personally intervene in the manufacture of public laws and policies. Night standing, the “yellow vessels”, zadiatrists, all these social movements express this new claim.
You write that the tension between two forms of democracy, representative and continuous, exists since the revolution of 1789. How?
Historically this tension resulted in two conceptions of the representation: “Fusion representation”, direct heritage of the monarchy, combines the body of the nation with that of its elected officials. “The people (…) can not speak, can act, only by his representatives,” says Father Sieyes in 1789.
But another form of representation – which I call the “gap representation” – is already enshrined in the declaration of human rights and the citizen of 1789: “Citizens compete personally or by their representatives in the manufacture Laws. “With the adverb” personally “, normative skill is listed in every letter. In addition, it can be read in the preamble that the declaration aims to allow the citizen to “compare” the action of political power with his rights, in order to “claim” respect. The constitutional foundations of a continuous democracy are present in this recognition of a political autonomy of the citizen.
You call the future President of the Republic to change the Constitution during a deliberative process. Why not resort to a constituent assembly?
The story shows that a constituent assembly is convened only after a revolution – in 1789 and in 1848 – the fall of a dictatorship – in Portugal in 1974 – a serious political crisis – in Chile. 2019 -, or a military defeat – in 1870. I propose the creation of a reflection committee on the constitution, composed half of citizens drawn and half of experts, with mission to engage in the country a deliberation decentralized on the total or partial rewrite of the text. This large debate, independent of the government, should last two years, in neighborhoods, businesses, schools, and lead to a text subject to referendum.
You have 39.56% of this article to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.