Realising direct democracy through representative democracy: what price do utopias pay by using the elections?
(2024) Beyond Failure: The Promise of Utopia — Location: University of Edinburgh (23.April.2024)
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- Among the many criticisms carried by the Yellow Vests movement in France since November 2018, criticisms related to representative government as a mode of exercising power occupy a prominent place and find resonance within the broader contemporary crisis of representative democracy. To address representative government’s failure to adequately represent the demos, the Yellow Vests movement has put forward many alternative propositions, many pertaining to direct democracy. These propositions vary from (local) Citizens’ Initiative Referendum to constituent assemblies, local popular assemblies and assemblies of assemblies. This contribution focuses on the local experiment of direct democracy in the form of assembly that has taken place in the municipality of Commercy, a town in the Meuse region of Eastern France, from the beginning of the Yellow Vests movement to the French municipal elections of March 2020. Nurtured by Murray Bookchin’s project of communalism or libertarian municipalism, a radical strand of municipalism, the movement in Commercy organised the struggle under the utopian vehicle of popular assembly, construed as a negative mirror of representative democracy. However, in face of the decline of the movement due to repression and exhaustion, it decided to continue the project of building the assembly through an electoral strategy. The contribution aims to study how the movement adopted the strategy of running for elections in order to give power to the assembly gathering the residents of the municipality, as a remedy to the decline of the Yellow Vests movement. More specifically, it aims to explore the tensions that have arisen in the process of choosing this strategy, the split that this choice has created and the paradoxes the movement has faced between their utopian ideals of direct democracy and the competitive vehicle of the elections. Though the electoral path has provided a new impulsion for the movement and offers them a vision of how to realise their goal to give power to the assembly, it has also forced the movement to pay a heavy price in terms of internal coherence. Indeed, the horizontal ethos of direct democracy, resting on a vision of a collective exercise of power, has been eroded by the competitive means that is the elections, pertaining to a personalist conception of politics. As the movement created a utopian form of direct democracy—the assembly—to mark its opposition to representative democracy, and then used the paradigmatic mechanism of representative democracy—the elections—to give power to the assembly, this paper seeks to understand how a local movement navigated the dialectical relationship between representative and direct democracy in the framework of a municipalist electoral strategy, and the contradictions that have emerged between direct democracy’s values of horizontality and representative democracy’s rationale of electoral competition. The paper is based on the data gathered during a two-years fieldwork in Commercy combining participant observation, individual and collective semi-structured interviews and textual analysis.
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Van Outryve d’Ydewalle, S. (2024). Realising direct democracy through representative democracy: what price do utopias pay by using the elections? Beyond Failure: The Promise of Utopia, University of Edinburgh. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/239604