By the time television latches-on to something and starts getting breathless about it, you can be sure that something is either past its sell-by date or is in someway a threat to television itself - for the best way to kill anything is to let TV presenters gush about it. Is that what is happening at the moment to participative democracy?

Suddenly the media are prostrating themselves before “la sagesse du peuple” with almost indecent haste. Every French radio station has announced a series of innovating programmes with state of the art titles like “Les candidates face aux auditeurs”, “Air libre” or “Service public”, in which ordinary but selected people can go head to head with, and can actually ask questions of, the man or woman who may be the next president. On television it’s even worse: sheep-like, all the channels are trotting along the line given by France 2’s director of information: “[During the election campaign] we want the maximum number of French people to participate”. Her channel is producing “A vous de juger” in which two candidates’ representatives (not the candidates themselves) slug it out in front of a jury of ten “witnesses”. On sister channels you can watch “Français, votez pour moi!”, as “candidates are confronted with reality”, something then defined as “meeting French citizens, with all their experience of life and powerful convictions.” The flagship TF1 is pitting each of the main candidates against 100 of their “ordinary” compatriots. Why 100? How many questions can be properly answered in an hour, dodging commercials? Fifteen?

In other words France is going to be inundated with people’s democracy until everyone is heartily sick of it, fulfilling Churchill’s “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” Which is a terrible shame. Participative democracy is a good idea, but it’s fragile and not a panacea for all the problems which so many western countries now face. It’s true it works best at the local level, when the people concerned know what is at stake, but even in a presidential election, if used wisely, it can stem the tide of disillusion with existing politics, get people implicated in the running of their lives or at the very least get them back into the voting booths.

Far more relevant for this election, I think, is the power of French political blogs, the 5^th power in France. If you want to look at the diversity on offer, start with BonVote, which classifies the top 100 most influential sites (out of the 1,436 sites scrutinised). BonVote also publishes its Top Buzz, counting the number of times each candidate is referred to on the net, for good or bad, in other words the noise each one generates. The current weekly evaluation shows Sarkozy at the top, followed by Royal, and then way below Michèle Alliot-Marie, François Bayrou et al. There is also a monthly version, drawn as a long tail: we can see that during January Ségolène Royal comes in first with 32,252 mentions (on the internet), Sarkozy now second with 26,807. Then it dips considerably: Chirac is third with 9,297. Other non-candidates follow until François Bayrou appears at 10^th position with 3,452 mentions, ahead of Nicolas Pont-Aignan and Le Pen with 3,363. Rachid Nekkaz, an excellent “petit” candidate, gets only 20 mentions (now 21). You can see the incredible gap: Sego get 10 times more mentions than Bayrou or Le Pen, who are jostling for third position in the actual race. It may well be that 9/10 of the battle is just to get people talking about you, particularly on the net. BonVote also shows how many sites are gathered round each party: the socialists have 255 sites, the UMP 157, the Greens a mere 32 and the FN 14 – but they don’t need the internet. The Greens do, however, and will never make headway on 32 sites.

Most of the best independent sites are listed on the right: Thierry Crouzet I find very good, Loïc Lemeur is considered the doyen of French bloggers and he has an English site. He has come down on Sarkozy’s side, Crouzet I think is more neutral. Thierry Maillet’s site is good too, and Nicolas Voisin’s Nuesblog. Reading them can be like a breath of fresh air, because they are not strait-jacketed by la pensée unique and indeed they are not always about the election. They are not necessarily interested in party politics, but often concerned more with deeper issues -  such as people’s democracy.

There is also a very good citizen’s newspaper, AgoraVox, which has an English version too, but since that is written by English-speakers, the centre of interest is mainly on the other side of the Atlantic and the French election features very little.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 27th, 2007 at 3:48 pm and is filed under Political, The press, Participative Democracy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.