Editorial of the “World”. The rule of law, in other words respect for the law by everyone, rulers and governed, is neither an archaic carcaval nor a simple subject of intellectual acrobatics for lawyers. It is nothing less than what distinguishes a democracy of an authoritarian regime. It is also the principle that allows to preserve civil peace by deciding our disputes by application of rules accepted by all. Supreme law organizing our institutions, the Constitution is the keystone of this rule of law.
Not to worry about the “referendum bill”, the centerpiece of the Marine Le Pen project, a candidate for the Supreme Judiciary. It is not a matter of modernizing democracy, to remedy the crisis of representativity that our country knows, but to upset the republican foundations to institutionalize the “national priority”, in other words the principle of discrimination between French and foreign. It is also about abolishing the acquisition of nationality by birth in France (soil law) – which even Vichy has not dared – and to make optional the application of the European rules and therefore to hire An unassuished process of rupture with the European Union.
This new constitution wanted by the national gathering candidate (NR) would violate both the declaration of human rights of 1789 (principle of equality before the law), the preamble to the 1946 Constitution (prohibition of Discrimination due to origins) and the current supreme law adopted in 1958, which takes the two previous texts.
Without being able to adopt this real change of regime by the normal procedure for revision of the Constitution (Article 89), which implies an approval by the members and senators, M me Le Pen wishes to pass In force using article 11 on the referendum, which allows you to do without Parliament but excludes constitutional revisions.
Proof of force with the Constitutional Council
Such an approach supposes to violate the constitution and to override the high jurisdiction which is the guardian, the Constitutional Council. The latter, that the 1958 text erects by guarantor of the “regularity” of the referendums, has declared himself competent in 2000 to judge the validity of the decree summoning the electors for a referendum, and therefore of the constitutionality of the draft law submitted to the vote which is annexed to this decree. The project of M me the pen therefore assumes a double test of force with the Constitutional Council, both on the use of Article 11 and on the constitutionality of its “national priority”.
Technical, complex, this legal debate must not hide the central issue: the project of Marine Le Pen referendum returns to break with fundamental Republican principles by playing the people “only sovereign” against the rule of law, in the manner of Polish and Hungarian illiberal regimes. The most serious would be that the candidate manages to forget this essential piece of his presidential project by drowning in the “social” speech that she now deploys.
Far from translating his peaceful and reassuring remarks, his bag plane of the constitution and institutionalized discrimination would fake anger and violence. It should not become the “elephant in the room”, a enormity that no one would see and dare to denounce by fear of a stigma allegedly counterproductive. In fact, it is a state of dismantling the rule of law to denounce and repel resolutely.