2027: France undecided, a symptom of a democracy emptying from the top

According to Le Monde, with fewer than six months to go before the 2027 presidential election, a large share of French voters do not know which ballot they will slip into the box. The paper describes a proliferation of candidates, a rejection of Macronism (the politics of President Emmanuel Macron) and fear of the National Rally (RN) coming to power. These voters, it writes, are interested in politics but largely disillusioned. One of them confides that he is thinking of "giving proxy to [his] children and letting them vote for [him]". We know no more than that: the report gives neither polling figures nor a precise sociological profile of these undecided voters. What follows is therefore our reading, not an established fact.

That sentence, first of all, deserves a pause. This is not indifference speaking, it is the fatigue of having watched too much. A citizen who follows the campaign, weighs it up, hesitates, and ends up considering having someone else cast his vote for him: here is a crisis of representation in its purest form. The people have not left politics; politics has made them understand there is no place for them in it.

Fear of the RN, for its part, works like house arrest. You vote against, always against, and discover that for years you have elected precisely what you wanted to avoid. Rejection of Macronism says the same thing in reverse: a politics conducted from above, in the name of managerial reason, that wearies those it claims to administer. Between the two, the multiplication of candidates looks less like a democratic festival than a market stall where each sells his small difference.

The left would be wrong to rejoice at being the default option. A reform, a coalition, a summit agreement: the yardstick remains the one Rosa Luxemburg set down, namely whether a measure strengthens the confidence and power of workers or demobilises them. A left content to manage capital with a bit more goodwill does not answer the disillusioned voter; it confirms him in his diagnosis.

For the same Luxemburg, democracy is indispensable to the working class, because it is by exercising it, and by fighting for it, that the class becomes conscious of its interests (our translation, Reform or Revolution). Yet democracy is not learned by ticking a ballot every five years, still less by delegating it. It is learned in neighbourhood assemblies, in living trade unions, in strikes where people decide for themselves. Mass movements teach faster than any party school, but anger must still find somewhere to become lasting.

That is where the post-2027 period will be decided, whoever wins. A left that campaigned only for the ballot would leave undecided voters to their solitude. One that built places where people decide together would give them a reason to vote, and above all a reason to act between elections.

You do not give your proxy to your children when you have something to say; you do so only when nobody is listening to you anymore.