YET ANOTHER PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

Seven months before the election, the machinery is already accelerating and, once again, every eye is turning towards the Élysée. The opinion polls reveal a striking contradiction: while three quarters of the French are intensely interested in the election and expect genuine social and political change from it, roughly the same proportion believe that the country’s situation will continue to deteriorate. Beyond the polling and the clash of political egos, this collective contradiction should concern us. Why does a nation so quick to challenge its institutions persist in looking for salvation in a single man or woman?

Every five years, the ritual repeats itself. We search for the providential figure who, by the mere force of election, will restore authority, revive the education system, reindustrialise the country, heal the fractures of the Republic, and so on. The cast changes, but the expectation does not. The intoxication of the campaign invariably gives way to the hangover of government, with its familiar procession of constraints, disappointments and, above all, betrayals. What if the tragedy of the French people is not that we systematically choose the wrong candidate, but that we continue to expect from the presidency what it is no longer capable of delivering?

YESTERDAY’S REMEDY, TODAY’S POISON

This is not an attempt to put the Fifth Republic blindly on trial. In 1958, it did not emerge from an authoritarian impulse, but from an acute emergency. Mired in the Algerian War and paralysed by the chronic instability of successive governments, France was wavering. The institutional architecture conceived by Michel Debré and Charles de Gaulle responded to a genuine threat of collapse: executive power had to be pulled out of parliamentary impotence and the head of state placed above the constant quarrels of party politics.

In the turmoil of the time, this vertical structure possessed an implacable logic and proved remarkably effective, but the France of 1958 is not the France of today. More importantly, the decisive shift came in 1962, with the introduction of direct presidential election by universal suffrage. What had begun as an institutional remedy became a suffocating political culture. The head of state was no longer merely the keystone of the system; the presidency became the vessel into which the country poured all its passions, the exclusive centre of gravity around which its hopes and resentments gathered. Emmanuel Macron’s two terms have brought this dynamic to a degree rarely seen under the Fifth Republic. Designed to give the state a summit capable of acting, the system has left us politically one-eyed: we no longer know where else to look.

THE PERSISTENT SPECTRE OF JACOBINISM

This fascination with the nerve centre of power reaches much further back than Gaullism. By destroying the unequal order of the Ancien Régime, its privileges and its guilds, the French Revolution liberated the individual, but it also artificially standardised the nation. From 1789 onwards, the mosaic of provincial statuses was swept away by the geometric administration of the departments. In 1791, the Le Chapelier Law prohibited professional coalitions. Its intention was deeply emancipatory: to free citizens from inherited affiliations, privileges and bodies claiming the right to speak on their behalf. The problem was not that those old dependencies were broken. It was that sufficient power was never returned to those who had just been freed.

France gradually built something else: an increasingly powerful centre facing individuals and communities whose ability to act remained narrow. The problem, therefore, is not the absence of intermediary bodies, but the accumulation at the top of powers that could be exercised freely at the base. The problem is not that central authority exists; it is that too many things ultimately wait for its permission, its funding or its solution.

From this comes one of our most persistent political reflexes. At the slightest shock, at the first sign of crisis, the same question rises again: “What is the state doing?” And almost immediately afterwards: “What is the president going to do?”

BREAKING THE ASSUMPTION OF CENTRALISATION

The deeper democratic problem lies in this blindness. We tear ourselves apart over who should occupy the summit of the pyramid without ever daring to ask why so many decisions must climb so high in the first place.

For centuries, centralisation rested on a powerful material argument: scale demanded concentration. Coordinating millions of people and moving information across a country was expensive and required an enormous bureaucracy. Complexity seemed to require a centre. That assumption has run its course.

The digital revolution, open-source systems, decentralised cryptography and now artificial intelligence are dramatically reducing the costs of coordination, access to knowledge and analysis. These technologies make the omnipresence of the centre increasingly difficult to justify. The centuries-old argument that “this is simply too complex to be managed from below” loses much of its force when communities can organise themselves, share knowledge, administer projects, pool resources and experiment with different forms without sending every decision back up the chain.

We have entered the age of cryptocurrencies, distributed ledgers and smart contracts. Smart contracts can automatically execute predefined rules on a blockchain without requiring an intermediary to intervene at every stage. They can already be used to create assets, organise exchanges, administer certain forms of governance and execute commitments once predetermined conditions are met. These are not merely technological curiosities; they are new architectures upon which human beings can begin to organise parts of collective life differently. Their significance is political as much as technical: functions we once assumed to be inseparable from a central administration or a bank can increasingly be organised in other ways.

These technologies can strengthen both ends of the political architecture at once. At the base, they can give free communities the material means of greater autonomy: the ability to make more decisions for themselves, build their own solutions, exchange with one another, experiment, learn from one another and sustain a plurality of models without constantly waiting for permission from a central authority. Freedom then means more than choosing between decisions made elsewhere; it means recovering the concrete ability to produce decisions ourselves.

At the top, the same transformation can make possible a more focused yet more capable central authority. Freed from a multitude of functions it has no reason to administer directly, the centre can concentrate its resources on what genuinely justifies its existence: protecting the social compact, guaranteeing the common law and fundamental rights, and ensuring collective security against internal and external threats. Artificial intelligence, automation and better information systems can then be used not to expand the centre’s reach indefinitely, but to help it perform the few responsibilities that genuinely need to be common more effectively, more quickly and more intelligibly. This is not a vision of a weak state facing strong communities. It is a vision of a state powerful where its power is necessary, and absent where it is not.

Technology does not therefore impose a purely decentralised future upon us; it simply strips away the technical excuse that once allowed concentrated power to present itself as a necessity. That is precisely what most of the presidential political offer is unlikely to tell us, not because these technologies are unknown, but because they force us to ask a question those aspiring to control the centre have little incentive to raise: which functions should the centre agree to stop exercising?

What is perhaps most striking is that even those who claim to want a rupture with the Fifth Republic do not necessarily break with its centralising logic. One can abolish hyper-presidentialism, strengthen Parliament, introduce more referendums and write a new Constitution while leaving intact the fundamental assumption that the national centre should organise, plan and coordinate an ever greater share of collective life. Contemporary proposals for a Sixth Republic can thus combine a more parliamentary political system and greater citizen participation with national ecological planning, new planning bodies and an expanded role for the state in directing production. The paradox deserves to be confronted directly: it is perfectly possible to democratise access to power while leaving almost untouched the assumption that power itself should remain concentrated at the centre.

The problem is therefore not that the state pursues common objectives, including ecological ones, but that the urgency of those objectives is taken to relieve us of the obligation to ask how the power required to achieve them should be distributed. Friedrich Hayek formulated a warning in 1944 that remains worth revisiting: when a central authority seeks to organise economic activity comprehensively in pursuit of a predetermined hierarchy of collective ends, planning ceases to be merely a technical instrument and becomes a question of individual liberty. The climate emergency does not make that question obsolete; it makes it more important.

THE REAL BREAK IS NOT AT THE ÉLYSÉE

And yet, as the 2027 election approaches, France appears ready to fall once again into the same habits. Many seem to believe that the next occupant of the Élysée will somehow possess the power to bend reality to their will, even though we know perfectly well that any president will be constrained by global markets, European law, a resistant administration and geopolitical crises.

This politics of providence is a gentle narcotic that suits everyone: the candidates who wrap themselves in it, the parties that feed on it, and the media system that thrives on it. It is intellectually far more comfortable to wait passively for the arrival of a saviour than to assume the formidable responsibility of our own collective autonomy.

And the answer will not come from simply improving representative democracy either. Electing more members of Parliament, changing the electoral system, transferring more power from the Élysée to the National Assembly or multiplying parliamentary controls may alter the operation of the regime, but they do not address the deeper problem. As long as we continue to understand democracy primarily as the art of periodically choosing those who will decide at the centre on our behalf, we remain trapped inside the same architecture. Representation must become one function of democracy again, rather than its synonym. It remains necessary for the limited number of questions that genuinely have to be decided in common, but a free society cannot permanently ask national representatives to administer what individuals, cities, territories and communities are capable of deciding for themselves. The real institutional leap therefore consists not merely in representing the French more accurately at the top, but in ensuring that a much larger share of collective life no longer needs to be represented at the top in order to exist politically. France, like other Western democracies, is reaching the end of an institutional cycle; changing the people who govern without changing the way power itself is distributed will not be enough to move beyond it.

An institution can solve the dangers that gave birth to it and, sixty years later, become the corset suffocating the society it was meant to protect. The stakes of 2027 therefore reach beyond both presidential personalities and the mere parliamentarisation of the regime. The task is to found a new political architecture around a radically different principle: a narrower but powerful centre in the few functions that genuinely need to be common, facing free communities endowed with the broadest possible capacity to act.

The real break requires us to unshackle democracy. It lies in restoring power to those communities, in their ability to decide, experiment and organise for themselves, and in a state strong enough to guarantee the common compact, the law, fundamental freedoms and collective security — but restrained enough not to administer what can be handled closer to those directly concerned.

France will elect a president in 2027. But nothing will fundamentally change as long as we continue to concentrate at the top responsibilities that have no reason to be there, and then ask a single individual to repair the consequences of that very concentration.

The political and institutional crisis is already here. It may simply have to run its course before it becomes impossible to deny that the parties sustained by the existing order cannot resolve a crisis that has become too systemic for them. Then we will have to resist the temptation to artificially prop up what is already exhausted, and when it becomes clear that the old answers no longer answer anything, there may be no great battle left to fight: we may simply have to bend down, gather what remains, and rebuild the nation differently. That is the road back towards popular autonomy and responsibility — two ambitions that institutions governing ever greater parts of our lives have gradually pushed aside.

Dear readers,

France is a nation that has repeatedly reinvented itself throughout its history, that has known how to look its crises in the face and make its way through troubled times. Regimes pass, constitutions succeed one another, institutions grow old. But no institutional crisis condemns a nation to disappear with the regime that produced it. France is older than the Fifth Republic, larger than its parties, and more enduring than the men and women who temporarily claim to embody it.

That is also why we created THE SUBJECT. To bring back into public debate what habit, institutions and established interests have gradually presented as untouchable. To question architectures of power rather than merely choosing who gets to occupy them. To look at political crises not as accidents that must endlessly be patched over, but as opportunities to show what must be dismantled and what must be rebuilt differently.

We want this space to be open to anyone who, whatever their background or convictions, has something to say about the way power is exercised, distributed and contested.

We do not need to wait for another saviour; we need to recover the collective capacity to think about what comes next.