The Twilight of Democracy?

Winston Churchill is said to have summed up democracy in a phrase that has become famous: it would be the worst of all systems, except for all the others.¹

The phrase raises a smile. Above all, it should give us pause.

For the question that arises today is perhaps no longer whether democracy is the best of systems, but whether our democracy still works as it claims to: government of the people, by the people and for the people.

The unease runs deep. Abstention, distrust of political leaders, electoral fragmentation, the rise of protest votes, the weakening of the great parties of government: all these phenomena tell, each in its own way, one and the same story.

A growing share of citizens no longer believes that their vote can truly change the course of events.

And a democracy in which the citizen votes without believing in the power of their vote necessarily begins to empty itself of its substance.

The disavowal of the elites

The Yellow Vests movement, which emerged in the autumn of 2018 in the wake of the rise in fuel prices before broadening into far deeper demands concerning purchasing power, public services and representation, should have been heard as a major warning.²

It revealed a fracture that goes well beyond the economic question alone: a part of France no longer feels represented by those who govern it.

Our political elites often appear too homogeneous in their backgrounds, their education and sometimes even their way of thinking. Political power seems to have gradually become a profession, with its codes, its careers, its strategies and its professionals.

The problem is obviously not that political leaders are competent or well trained. It is that a democracy cannot function durably when those who govern end up forming, in the eyes of those they represent, a world apart.

To this is added a worrying evolution of public action.

On many subjects, we have gradually replaced education with prohibition, responsibility with regulation, anticipation with punishment.

We produce norms to correct the consequences of problems we did not have the courage to address at their source.

And above all, we increasingly govern in the grip of urgency.

Yet governing is not only administering the present.

The future is not forecast: it is prepared.

It is precisely this capacity to prepare the future that seems today to be lacking in much of our political class.

A democracy become minority?

The problem of representativeness can no longer be ignored.

The 2024 legislative elections give an interesting illustration of it. In the first round, the Rassemblement National gathered 29.26% of the votes cast, but only 19.01% of registered voters. The union of the left represented 18.23% of registered voters and Ensemble 13.03%.³

This is not about questioning the legality or the constitutional legitimacy of those elected. The democratic rules are known and must of course be respected.

But these figures raise a deeper question: what becomes of political legitimacy when each political force ultimately represents only a minority of the electoral body?

The fragmentation of the vote profoundly transforms our system.

The Fifth Republic was long organised, to put it simply, around two large blocs capable of governing, around which smaller formations would gather.

That system has imploded.

We are now confronted with a political mosaic in which no bloc manages durably to assemble a sufficient majority. Alliances become necessary, sometimes between formations whose programmes and convictions still seemed incompatible a few weeks earlier.

Compromise is indispensable to democracy.

But compromise without a common project ends up becoming a mere technique for holding on to power.

And it is then that representative democracy begins to lose the confidence of those it claims to represent.

The real ill: the disappearance of responsibility

There is, however, a responsibility that we too readily assign to political leaders alone.

It is collective.

We want more security, more health, better public services, more purchasing power, better pensions, more education and more social protection.

But we simultaneously want fewer taxes, fewer levies and fewer constraints.

This contradiction is probably one of the great weaknesses of our contemporary democracies.

The political leader knows it.

And rather than saying that a political choice almost always implies a sacrifice elsewhere, he too often prefers to promise the whole.

This is how demagoguery gradually replaces politics.

France provides a spectacular illustration of it with its public finances. At the end of 2025, our public debt reached about €3,460 billion, or 115.6% of GDP. The public deficit still represented 5.1% of GDP.⁴

These figures are neither right-wing nor left-wing.

They are simply debts.

And they will, in one way or another, have to be borne.

What company would accept, for decades, that its managers structurally spend more than they earn, pile up deficits and systematically pass the consequences of their decisions on to their successors?

A State is obviously not a company.

But there is one rule common to both: one cannot durably consume what one has not produced without someone, one day, paying the price.

We have gradually invented a particularly comfortable democracy: one in which those who decide today can have part of their decisions paid for by those who do not yet vote.

This is perhaps the most silent form of breach of the democratic contract.

Europe: from political dream to normative machine?

The same problem is found at the European scale.

One must first remember what the European project was.

On 9 May 1950, Robert Schuman, inspired notably by Jean Monnet and soon joined by Konrad Adenauer and Alcide De Gasperi, proposed to pool French and German coal and steel production.⁵

The ambition was immense and yet extraordinarily pragmatic: to make a new war between the European nations not only unthinkable but materially impossible by creating a concrete solidarity between them.

The European Coal and Steel Community was born in 1951. The Treaty of Rome of 1957 continued this construction by creating the European Economic Community.⁶

The market was not the project.

It was the instrument of the project.

The project was political: peace, prosperity, cooperation and a common destiny.

Seventy-five years later, one must have the courage to ask a question: what has become of that project?

Europe sometimes gives the feeling of having become too small for the great problems and too large for the small ones.

Too small or too divided when it comes to defence, energy, diplomacy, artificial intelligence, food sovereignty, research or industrial policy.

But extraordinarily present when it comes to regulating ever more precise aspects of economic and everyday life.

It is this paradox that feeds the rejection of Europe.

And it would be too easy to brush this criticism aside by simply calling it populist.

The diagnosis of Europe’s decline is, moreover, no longer only that of the eurosceptics.

The report presented in 2024 by Mario Draghi on European competitiveness itself notes the growing productivity gap between Europe and the United States, notably in the new technologies, and estimates that Europe should mobilise €750 to 800 billion of additional investment each year to meet the challenges of competitiveness, of digital and energy transition, and of defence.⁷

While the United States and China invest massively in artificial intelligence, energy, semiconductors, space or breakthrough technologies, Europe still too often seems to hesitate between regulating the future and building it.

The problem is not that Europe regulates. The problem would be that it regulates what others invent.

The missed appointment of 2005

There is also a European democratic wound whose consequences we may still underestimate.

On 29 May 2005, the French were called to vote by referendum on the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe.

Turnout was high: 69.37%.

The result was unambiguous: 54.67% of the votes cast said no.⁸

It would be historically excessive to claim that the same text was then imposed on the French: the Treaty of Lisbon of 2007 was legally different.

But it is just as difficult to deny that it took up an important part of the institutional changes previously proposed, and that it was ratified by parliamentary route.⁹

Whatever opinion one may hold on the substance of the treaty, the episode left a deep mark.

For when a people is consulted directly, the way its answer is then taken into account politically is essential.

One cannot ask the citizen to believe in the referendum if he comes to feel that his answer is truly worthy of respect only when it matches the one expected by those who govern.

A society that is fragmenting

But it would be too simple to hold politics alone responsible for our difficulties.

Our society itself is fragmenting.

The institutions that once formed almost unquestioned pillars — the school, the justice system, the police, the hospital, sometimes even the family — are going through deep crises.

The social networks have, moreover, upended our relationship to information.

They have democratised speech, which is a formidable advance.

But they have simultaneously placed on the same plane knowledge and opinion, expertise and assertion, the verified fact and the rumour.

Everyone can now speak about everything, immediately.

The time of reflection is gradually replaced by that of reaction.

Nuance becomes suspect because it takes time.

Indignation, for its part, is instantaneous.

Radical ideologies, communitarianisms, certain religious or political fundamentalisms and every form of extremism thrive in this environment.

The danger is not the diversity of opinions.

It is indispensable to democracy.

The danger begins when we no longer even share a common reality from which we can disagree.

The people are not incapable: we have weakened the conditions of their judgement

It would be profoundly unjust to conclude that citizens have become incapable of understanding the issues.

The problem lies elsewhere.

We have gradually weakened the conditions that allow the exercise of an informed judgement.

Political programmes are often reduced to a few slogans.

The real cost of promises is rarely explained.

The ten- or twenty-year consequences of decisions taken today are almost absent from the debate.

The media naturally favour the event.

The social networks favour emotion.

And political leaders too often favour the next electoral deadline.

How, in these conditions, can one ask the citizen to reason over the long term?

Democracy can only function if it rests simultaneously on the freedom of the citizen and his responsibility.

We must therefore rebuild the conditions of that responsibility.

Reforming rather than enduring

Democracy is not doomed.

But it must probably evolve.

The Swiss model deserves, in this respect, to be observed without necessarily being copied.

Switzerland combines representative democracy, federalism and direct democracy. The optional referendum notably allows citizens, under certain conditions, to demand that a law passed by the Federal Parliament be submitted to a popular vote.¹⁰

This system suppresses neither disagreements nor errors.

But it creates something we have gradually lost: a direct responsibility of the citizen in certain collective decisions.

Why not draw inspiration from it?

A few avenues would at least deserve to be debated:

• restoring genuine recourse to the referendum on the great national orientations;
• allowing, under conditions demanding enough to prevent its trivialisation, a citizens’ referendum initiative;
• decentralising far more strongly the decisions that can be;
• requiring any electoral programme presenting significant economic measures to be the subject of a public, independent and adversarial costing;
• systematically publishing the ten- and twenty-year impact of the great decisions concerning public finances;
• reviewing our voting systems in order to reconcile representativeness and the capacity to govern;
• reflecting at last, without taboo, on adapting the Fifth Republic to a political landscape that no longer has much in common with that of 1958.

This is not about weakening representative democracy.

It is, on the contrary, about saving it by restoring what it most lacks today: confidence and responsibility.

The courage to say no

The French political problem is perhaps, in the end, neither institutional, nor economic, nor even ideological.

It holds perhaps in one word: courage.

The courage to explain that a nation cannot simultaneously increase all its spending and reduce all its revenue.

The courage to explain that a reform produces losers as much as winners.

The courage to say that a right sometimes implies a duty.

The courage to explain that the State cannot do everything.

The courage to acknowledge that a border, a school, a justice system or an energy policy do not function on good intentions alone.

And above all the courage to say no, sometimes, to those whose vote one nevertheless seeks.

It is probably this courage that our modern democracies most lack.

Conclusion — Twilight is not yet night

The twilight of democracy is not inevitable.

But it will not be avoided by the mere force of habit.

Our political system, our European project and our society bear the symptoms of one and the same ill: the absence of vision, the dilution of responsibility and the growing difficulty of choosing.

The Fifth Republic has perhaps become partly ill-suited to a deeply fragmented political landscape.

Europe has perhaps drifted too far from the simplicity and the force of its founders’ project: to do together what the European nations could no longer accomplish alone.

And our citizens themselves must accept a truth that political demagoguery too often hides from them: democracy does not consist only in claiming rights. It also consists in collectively bearing the price of our choices.

This is why we must give the citizen more power.

But more power also means more responsibility.

The referendum must therefore not be seen as a weapon against those who govern. It can once again become an instrument of democratic maturity, placing the French before clear choices and their consequences.

For there is a fundamental difference between governing and managing.

Managing consists in solving the problems of today.

Governing consists in preparing the world of tomorrow.

A company that continually refused to look at its future would end up disappearing. A State can put off the moment of truth far longer, because it can levy taxes, borrow and transfer part of its burden to the following generations.

But it cannot put off that moment forever.

We must therefore rediscover a collective ambition.

Not a new political promise.

A project.

A project clear enough for the French to understand it.

Courageous enough for them to measure its sacrifices.

And great enough that they may want, once again, to believe in it.

Twilight is not yet night.

But to find the light again, we must still decide in which direction we want to walk.