Realising direct democracy through representative democracy: From the Yellow Vests to a libertarian municipalist strategy in Commercy

Abstract

Among the many criticisms carried by the Yellow Vests movement, criticisms related to representative government as a mode of exercising power occupy a prominent place and find resonance within the broader contemporary crisis of representative democracy. In the face of this crisis, the Yellow Vests movement has put forward many alternative propositions for direct democracy. This contribution focuses on the local experiment of assembly direct democracy that has taken place in the municipality of Commercy, a town in the Meuse region of Eastern France, from the beginning of the Yellow Vests movement to the municipal elections of March 2020. The contribution studies the specific strategy the movement adopted, that of running for elections to give power to the assembly that gathers the town residents. As the movement created a form of direct democracy – the assembly – to mark its opposition to representative democracy, and then used the paradigmatic mechanism of representative democracy – the elections – to give power to the assembly, it enables an understanding of how a movement navigated the dialectical relationship between representative and direct democracy in the framework of a libertarian municipalist electoral strategy and the tensions that have arisen in the process.

Politicising proximity: Radical municipalism as a strategy in crisis

“…But this is not the only polarisation that hinders its political potential. As the contributions to this special issue demonstrate, divisions and contradictions abound: between the public and the common (Bianchi, 2023; Russell et al, 2023); between direct and representative democracy (van Outryve d’Ydewalle, 2023); between spontaneous grassroots organisation and institutionalised structures (Pinto et al, 2023); between innovating participatory processes within the green-left and building cross-class coalitions and counter-hegemonic visions (Béal et al, 2023); between green growth and degrowth (Sareen and Waagsaether, 2023), between urban centrality and peripheral urbanisation (Toro and Orozco, 2023); between territory regulated as state space and territory conceived as non-state self-government (Arpini et al, 2023); between embodying the slow time of feminist prefigurative practices and mastering the fast time of masculinist grammars, turned against hostile forces (Sarnow and Tiedermann, 2023); between dealing with the path-dependencies of history, utopian and dystopian, and engaging in future-oriented movement-building (Milan, 2023); between overhauling the state machinery and leveraging local government to deliver policy programmes (Bua and Davies, 2023); between transforming the state form through rupture and prefiguring new state forms through interstitial experimentation and symbiotic hacking (Joubert, 2023; Thorpe and Morgan, 2023); between reconfiguring capitalist supply chains and developing autonomous counter-logistics (Minuchin and Maino, 2023); between care as an economic sector for productivity and care as an ethics for reimagining the city (Kussy et al, 2023). So it seems that just as municipalists work to prise open the cracks in capitalism, so too do fissures and fault lines appear in radical municipalist strategy itself – a hypothesis just as challenged by the intersectional contradictions of colonial capitalism and the patriarchal nation-state as it is poised to sublate them.…”

“…In Naples, Zagreb or Belgrade, an anti-establishment sentiment was key to the justification of bringing power back to people (Milan, 2023, Pinto et al, 2023). The form of the local assembly where citizens participate directly and not through representatives – strongly advocated by Bookchin (2015)– was on the table in the French local elections of 2020 (Béal et al, 2023, van Outryve d’Ydewalle, 2023), but also more generally in the Fearless Cities network (Barcelona en Comú et al, 2019). Radical democracy has been the most salient element of radical municipalist experiments, and it includes two principles: making democracy less representative and more participatory; and devolving power to the local level, where face-to-face interactions and the immediate scale makes possible more horizontal decision-making mechanisms (Roth, 2019a).…”

“…Van Outryve d’Ydewalle (2023) studies the case of Commercy to show yet another limitation of municipalism: when focused overtly on procedures, the project can lose steam and fail electorally. Here, the distinctly Bookchinean strategy was to build an autonomous citizen assembly and then run for elections.…”

“…Feminisation of politics goes further than Hardt and Negri’s (2017: 18) inversion of traditional leadership – ‘strategy to the movements and tactics to the leadership’ – to radically democratise even tactical decision-making. One approach to this is the distinctively municipalist form of the assembly, in which wholly-recallable delegates – not elected representatives – are mandated by popular decisions made by the assembly through deliberative and consensus-based decision-making (van Outryve d’Ydewalle, 2019, 2023). As Caren Tepp, of Ciudad Futura in Rosario, Argentina, has remarked: ‘a leader is not the coach of a football team.…”