by Aurelien
A few weeks ago, I discussed some of the structural weaknesses in western political systems, and notably how public expectations and demands of government were completely out of alignment with the supply of policies and actions actually on offer. Thus, changes in support for different political parties don’t necessarily imply that opinion in the country has itself changed, but rather that electorates are increasingly giving their support to whichever party they think can get the current incumbents out of power, and perhaps introduce policies that have more relevance to ordinary peoples’ lives.
One of the most noted features of the British and French elections this year was that the number of seats gained in the parliaments of the two countries had little connection with the percentage of the popular vote, or the balance of public opinion generally. Even the media adjacent to the Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC) and so part of the Outer Party, did at least deign to notice the fact, and even went so far as to accept that most people voted reluctantly, and often against, rather than for, something. This leads us to the theme I want to develop further in this essay: that what is wrong with most of the political systems in the West is not a matter of procedures and institutions, and that it is time to stop thinking that tinkering with electoral processes or the details of the political institutions of a country will actually make much difference. Indeed, for all that such tinkering is a subject of transcendent fascination to the PMC, it usually makes the position worse and not better, since it diverts attention from the real problems. There is a fundamental political problem here, and in general I think history shows sufficiently that attempts at technical solutions to political problems simply don’t work.
I’m going to talk a fair bit (but not exclusively) about the French case, because it is the most serious. For reasons I will go into, France may be without a government for nearly a year (the next elections cannot be called until July 2025) and there is no guarantee that a new election then will produce a National Assembly from which a government with a majority can actually be formed. In other words, politics in one of the two or three most important states in Europe may be terminally broken. Now I say “politics” rather than “political system,” since, as I will try to show, it’s not just a technical systemic problem, and attempts to fiddle with the detail to resolve it are pointless. And where France goes today, I rather fear other western states will follow quite quickly.
So let’s begin with Macron’s start-up kingdom. Even with the fighting in Ukraine, the slaughter in Gaza and the chaos in the United States, you’ll probably be aware that there were parliamentary elections in France on 30 June and 7 July. You probably also know that after the second round, there were three principal blocs of parties in the National Assembly, none of them large enough to form a government. You may have heard it said that calling the election was completely unnecessary in the first place, and that even now nobody outside a very tight circle of courtiers has any real idea why Macron did it. Various complicated and imaginative theories have been put forward, but if this really was seven-dimensional chess, then it was an eight-dimensional defeat, as his own party lost a lot of seats and many of the remaining deputies are furious with him. The best explanation is probably that Macron panicked after the kicking his party received in the European elections, and decided on a “me or chaos” approach to the electorate which, unfortunately for him, replied “not you, anyway, mate.”
It’s also possible that you have heard that the government in power until July resigned, and that ever since (with a long break for the summer holidays) there have been efforts to identify a new Prime Minister who could then try to build a multi-party coalition. You may even have heard that this isn’t going well, and that every day brings new accusations, propositions, statistical exercises, personality clashes and even splits (the Socialists seem just to have split once more, though not many people noticed.) There isn’t even agreement on who should try to form a government: the “leftist” coalition, the Nouveau front populaire is, if you count in a particular way, the largest bloc, and so should by convention be asked to try to form a government. But it didn’t “win” the elections, as you may have been told: it’s just a scratch coalition of very divergent parties, which has an uneasy pole position for the time being. The largest individual party in the National Assembly is Le Pen’s party, the Rassemblement national (RN) and there’s no way she will ever be asked to form a government. So Macron’s party continues in government, without any prospect of a majority, transacting “current business” only. As we go to print, Macron has been “consulting” about a new Prime Minister, but, even if one is nominated this week, there’s little chance they will actually be able to form a government: as we shall see, the numbers don’t add up.
Now I’ll come back to some of the more detailed lessons to draw from this ghastly mess later, but first I want to look at some much more generic issues, beginning with an extremely simple but seldom-discussed question: if we say we want to live in a democracy, what do we mean by that term? Ask a Political Scientist and they will immediately start talking about free elections, voting systems, parliamentary organisation, legislation, voting rights and so on. If you ask them what these arrangements and institutions are actually for, though, you’ll get a puzzled look. As you might expect from a Liberal/PMC society, the focus for some time now has been on the technical aspects of running a parliamentary system, their alleged weaknesses, and how they might be improved. It’s uncritically assumed that technical changes can repair, or at least reduce, the alienation of ordinary people from the system operated by their rulers. Most arguments circle around a small number of alternatives: there has been pressure in France for some time to move to a Proportional Representation system because of its asserted strengths, just as it is losing popularity in other European countries because of its demonstrated weaknesses.
The debate is usually conducted entirely, or at least mainly, on a theoretical level. So First-Past-the-Post, or winner-take-all, voting is generally thought to provide “strong government” with continuity. Proportional Representation is generally agreed to be “fairer,” in that a parliament will more probably reflect the real level of support for different parties in the country, and allow smaller parties a voice. Regional list systems are often described as the “best compromise.” And so on. The merits of a directly elected President, a President elected by Parliament or a hereditary Head of State have generated a lot of argument. But again, much of this debate resembles arguments about which was the best fighter aircraft in the Second World War, or whether Ayrton Senna was a greater driver than Max Verstappen: all very interesting, but of no practical use, unless you first explain how the conclusions are relevant to your conception of what democracy is, and how it should work.
And you find fundamental dissatisfaction with the outputs of the political system in virtually every country, irrespective of the technical characteristics of that particular system. Like many people who once worked for the British government, I was (and am) a lukewarm Republican, because in government you very quickly see the negative effects of royal power and influence. Yet as time passed, it became clear that, curiously, the Royals were one of the last holdouts against the brutalism of neoliberalism, and for the preservation of traditional values of duty and community. It was this, perhaps, that made so many French people of all political persuasions say to me “you are so lucky to have a Queen in your country.” In turn, ordinary French people follow news about the Royals closely, and many millions watched the wall-to-wall coverage of the recent funerals and the Coronation of Charles III. To be fair, this was at least in part because of contrast with the poor quality of recent French Presidents: Sarkozy (2007-12) was a slimy, corrupt provincial lawyer escaped from a Balzac novel, whereas Hollande (2012-17) was a colourless bureaucrat with the charisma of a soggy baguette, and of Macron there is nothing of interest to say at all.
It’s always a case of seeing virtue in what you don’t have. So the progressive decline of UK politics in recent decades has produced a type of sour, almost vindictive republicanism, which implies that all the problems of the country could be cured if we only wheeled out the guillotines. This led to a rather unsavoury period of lip-smacking gleeful celebration of Royal deaths and several generations of the Royal Family suffering from cancer. (Another one bites the dust!). Yet more recently, I’m fairly sure that some of these same people have woken up sweating with fear in the middle of the night muttering to themselves President Boris Johnson, President Boris Johnson! As I always say, be very careful what you ask for, because you might get it. (George Orwell, you may recall, thought that a genuinely Socialist government in Britain would abolish the House of Lords but keep the Monarchy.)
Of course, it’s very difficult for the PMC to accept that the massive political problems of most western countries today have deeper roots than mere technical deficiencies, because that puts the Liberal PMC ideology and the last forty years of neoliberal brutalism in the spotlight instead. For example, the wholesale privatisation of state assets has turned critical sectors of the economy and daily life into organisations aimed at short-term financial maximisation rather than the provision of services. In turn this has led to the spread of a private sector mentality into what was the public sector and a corresponding fall in ethical standards As I’ve argued on many occasions “professionalisation” of politics has led to narrow, incompetent political figures coming to power and the development of what I call The Party in place of traditional political formations. Corruption is now much more of a problem than it was, simply because the opportunities for corruption are greater. With more interchanges between public and private, with an assumption that politics is just a career stop you profit from later, and with the need in many political systems to raise money to get elected, corruption is inevitable, and cannot be addressed by technical rule changes or “oversight” bodies. To cure this and other problems you have to go deep into the composition of politics and society themselves.
So then, if democracy is not about structures and processes and rules and percentages, what is it about? And what is the role of structures etc. in it, if any? I’m not intending to conduct a long discussion about the nature of democracy here, and I would discourage commenters from doing so. Let’s simply say that a democracy exists when the wishes and wants of the citizens are as far as possible translated into the characteristics and functioning of the society in which they live. The rest is technical detail, and the transmission mechanisms for making this happen are of secondary importance to the result. So we can consider this, once more, as an engineering problem. The inputs are the wants and desires of the citizens, the output is the satisfaction of those wants and desires, and there is thus a need for a process, the operation of a machine if you like, which will bring the output as close to the input as possible.
Obviously, there are always going to be practical problems. We are no longer in ancient Athens, where citizens could vote directly on issues, and referenda, for all that they can be very useful, cannot by themselves be a system of government. Governments have to deal with many other pressures and factors (including practicality) as well as public opinion, which is itself often divided. At a minimum, therefore, we need a skilled and experienced bureaucracy to put popular desires into practice to the degree that that is practicable. We also need some mechanism for providing this bureaucracy with political direction about how to satisfy the wants of ordinary people. But whether this actually requires a professional political class such as we have today is very much an open question, albeit not one we have time to go into here. Many societies in history have thought otherwise.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, most western countries today have a crisis of governability. The Party, with its elitist neoliberal ideology, is now divided into factions which have retained old political party names and invented a few new ones, but which differ only in matters of emphasis. Their policies are not in the interest of the majority of voters, which is why in many countries now, the majority of voters don’t vote. Those who do vote come either from the ten per cent or so which actively benefit from the Party’s policies, a somewhat greater percentage, often middle-class pensioners, who fear losing even that which they have, and a residue who vote from nostalgia for parties they used to support in the past, or simply to express disapproval of others. In some countries, nonetheless, parties and candidates have arisen from outside the Party, and often succeed in mobilising a large number of voters. But the Party and its media parasites, scared of what they cannot control, have so far managed to prevent them establishing themselves in power. In the face of such a degree of alienation of the people from the political class, the approved solution is … tinkering with the details of the system. After all, anything else would be to admit that this alienation was real and that it was the Party’s fault.
As I’ve said, the case of France is particularly instructive, because disillusion with the political class has now reached such a point that historically low numbers of French people even bother to vote, and this in a country where politics has always been taken seriously. (Ironically, the uptick in participation in July was linked to more, people voting for the RN. Oh dear.) After the pointless two-round National Assembly elections, then on the evening of 7 July, the French political system found itself blocked in a way that twenty years ago would have been thought impossible. Now it’s true that French politics has always been factional, and that, apart from the mighty Communist Party in its heyday, French political parties have themselves been coalitions of actors, often gathered around individual politicians. (Just today, I read that the leader of a breakaway faction of the traditional right-wing party Les Republicans is now going to form a new party: this happens all the time.) Even so, the disintegration of French political life represented by the current National Assembly is extraordinary: the more so since it has little to do with the actual divisions in the country, and a lot to do with egos and jealousies.
Just running through the numbers can make you dizzy. But the point of departure is that there are 577 seats in the National Assembly, and so a bare majority requires a government to be able to count on half of them plus one, or 289 seats. Until 2022, this generally happened, although party discipline and factionalism being what it is, governments generally needed more than that to be secure. Since 2022, the coalition of parties supporting Macron has not had a majority, and have been forced to rely on ad hoc deals with the rightwing Republicans. In the 2024 elections, things became catastrophically worse for Macron’s gang. Let’s have a look at the raw numbers. Of the 577 seats, the largest group is the NFP, that hastily assembled “leftist” alliance with 193 seats. Next is Ensemble the group generally supporting Macron with 166 seats, and then Le Pen’s RN and its allies with 142. Two things are obvious: first, no group is anywhere near the 289 seats needed to form a government, and second, that the totals don’t add up to 577. Where are the others? Well, there are about another dozen parties, some with only one member, who have formed themselves into “groups” to benefit from various advantages in the National Assembly. The only one of any size is The Republicans with 48 seats. (You may find slightly different numbers depending on the date of the information: deputies join and leave groups all the time.)
Now if this seems confusing, the detail is worse, and I will spare you most of it. Suffice it to say that each of the main groups is a coalition itself. The NFP “group”has four main parties and several tiny ones, with major policy differences between them. Macron’s gang consists of three separate parties and some independents. And Le Pen’s group includes refugees from the Republicans, who now constitute a new but allied party. So, whilst it would be theoretically possible for two of the groups to reach an agreement and dominate the Assembly, these groups actually find it impossible to agree even amongst themselves on most things. The NFP, in particular, is held together essentially by fear of the electoral consequences if it splits.
This hasn’t stopped journalists and pundits from playing the fascinating and absorbing game of Design Your Own Government.
