The European ecological group publishes a study of eight lawyers to try to assess the capacity to maintain a rule of law in the event of “authoritarian shock”.
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How would France resist the arrival of an authoritarian leader to the Presidency of the Republic? From the equivalent of a Viktor Orban, the Hungarian Prime Minister. Or, not to say it, Marine Le Pen, of the National Rally (RN). It is starting from such a scenario, more really incongruous after the 41.5 % obtained in the second round of the presidential election by the extreme right candidate, that a team of lawyers, funded by the group Les Verts /European free alliance (ALE), from the European Parliament, sought to determine the capacities of the country’s institutions to maintain the rule of law.
“For ten years, the rule of law has been in crisis in many countries of the European Union, recalled, Thursday, September 8 in Brussels, Laurent Pech, European lawyer at the University of Middlesex (London) and director of the study. In Hungary, we witnessed a progressive dismantling of the rule of law by using the most often legal paths, and this in the name of the Hungarian people. “This case is unfortunately not isolated: Poland follows the same slope. The two countries are also the subject of prosecution on the part of their peers for non-compliance with the fundamental values of the European Union.
“It is during the debate on the highly contested law on global security [in spring 2021] that the idea of this study was born, explains Gwendoline Delbos-Corfield, the ecological deputy on the initiative of this Work. In old democracies, there is this belief that we are immune and that we will never know what Hungarian or today Polish have known. “
many weaknesses
In fact, if France should see an authoritarian party leader arrive at his head, would she armed, at least legally, to respond and maintain a liberal democracy? The authors of the study were inspired by the methodology of “stress tests” – these resistance tests operated by the European Central Bank to experience the financial solidity of the banks -, in order to submit the French legal system as a whole to this test of “authoritarian shock”. Unsurprisingly, the conclusions are not really reassuring. And the French system has many weaknesses.
The lawyer Sébastien Plato, professor of public law at the University of Bordeaux, underlines, in addition to the ultra -concentration of the powers of the President of the Republic, the lack of independence within the justice of the public prosecutor and the fact that “” a certain number of guarantees of the independence of the members of the Council of State, the supreme administrative jurisdiction of the Republic, result only from custom, without textual base. Finally, the status of the members of the Constitutional Council does not guarantee these last against any form of political pressure “.
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