Macron wants to send the street back to the ballot box: the old reflex of democracy on display

According to franceinfo, Emmanuel Macron said the day after the 31 October mobilisation that "the electoral debate and the ballot box must take precedence over social democracy and the street". Following an "acte III" of school student and cost-of-living protests, the president judges that answers to the grievances must come "in the short term" from the government, then "in the medium term" from the presidential election. What the dispatch does not say: which concrete measures would be proposed, and by when. The rest is our reading.

First, note the hierarchy, stated with real candour. On one side, the ballot box, the long term, the controlled timetable. On the other, the street, asked to wait its turn. The pupils and workers struggling to make ends meet do not share the Élysée's agenda; inflation, for its part, does not wait for polling day. Answering a bill due today with "in the medium term" means absorbing anger while promising to deal with it later.

It is a classic reflex of bourgeois democracy, and Rosa Luxemburg described it without dressing it up. The participation of all layers of the people in political life takes, she wrote in Social Reform or Revolution, the form of bourgeois parliamentarism, where class antagonisms are not abolished but "laid bare in broad daylight" (our translation). The vote exists, of course, and we do not despise it: the labour movement paid dearly to win it. But making it the sole legitimate site of political speech is to confuse a tool with the whole of democracy.

For what remains of social democracy if it is asked to step aside before the election? An echo chamber, at most. Yet it is in mobilisation that people learn: how to organise, how to formulate their demands, how to gauge their strength. A strike, a column of school students, a general assembly: this is the school where collective confidence is forged, the kind that no presidential campaign, with its polls and soundbites, can produce on their behalf.

The useful criterion is the one proposed in the Gazette's notes on Luxemburg: does a measure strengthen the power and confidence of those at the bottom, or does it demobilise them? Sending the demands to the ballot box and to a government that will respond "in the short term" clearly belongs to the second category. Concessions, when they come, are clawed back as soon as profits require it; only sustained pressure keeps them alive.

Honesty requires acknowledging, however, that the street is no magic wand, and that the point is not to scorn the electoral terrain, where organised masses have already won real gains. The question is one of order. Who decides, and when? Democracy from below would require that mobilisations set their own demands, that assemblies deliberate, and that elected officials answer to the movement rather than the other way round.

The president asks the street to wait its turn. The street, for its part, could remind him that the ballot boxes were never filled by those who waited patiently.