Lecornu begs the banks to fund the presidential race: he who pays chooses

According to Le Monde, published on 5 November, Sébastien Lecornu has sent two new letters to French banks urging them to finance candidates in the presidential election. The banks, the paper says, are pushing for a solution involving financial institutions owned directly or indirectly by the state. We know no more at this stage: neither the sums involved, nor the criteria that would decide which candidates get served, nor the precise reasons for the impasse appear in the dispatch we have.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact. Let us first acknowledge the irony of the scene: a head of government who writes, once, then twice, to banks so they will agree to lend to would-be occupants of the highest office in the land. Representative democracy, the shopfront of popular sovereignty, reduced to begging for credit from private counters. And those counters, far from taking offence, reply: let the state handle it, or at least its satellites. Each passes the ball of risk to the other, and nobody asks why a candidacy depends on a credit committee.

The core question is there. When access to the race depends on the agreement of those who hold the money, universal suffrage begins upstream, in an office where "risk profiles" are assessed. Does a candidate who threatens the interests of financial capital have the same chance of getting a loan as one who reassures them? Nothing in the dispatch says that this is the case. But the mechanism makes the question legitimate, and it is the mechanism that must be judged.

The notion of hegemony, as developed by Antonio Gramsci, helps here: a ruling class governs as much by consent as by coercion, when its order becomes common sense. In this case, the idea that it is normal for a bank to referee the electoral contest passes almost unnoticed. We debate the modalities, public or private loan, never the principle. A state bank solution, moreover, fixes nothing in itself: it moves the counter without democratising the decision, and leaves the executive holding the key to the front door.

The Gazette's notes on Luxemburg recall that a reform is judged by a simple test: does it increase the power and confidence of workers, or does it demobilise them? An arrangement between government and bankers to save the electoral timetable fails at the outset. It manages the machine; it does not open it up. Citizens become spectators to a negotiation over their right to stand before them.

There, the parliamentary theatre is laid bare: the backstage is settled among well-bred people while the audience waits to be told who has the right to step onto the stage. A democracy that has to buy its ticket from the bank should not be surprised when someone counts its seats.