The Machine Stops.

And fiddling won't fix it.

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A few weeks ago, I discussed some of the structural weaknesses in western political systems, and notably how public expectations and demands of government were completely out of alignment with the supply of policies and actions actually on offer. Thus, changes in support for different political parties don’t necessarily imply that opinion in the country has itself changed, but rather that electorates are increasingly giving their support to whichever party they think can get the current incumbents out of power, and perhaps introduce policies that have more relevance to ordinary peoples’ lives.

One of the most noted features of the British and French elections this year was that the number of seats gained in the parliaments of the two countries had little connection with the percentage of the popular vote, or the balance of public opinion generally. Even the media adjacent to the Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC) and so part of the Outer Party, did at least deign to notice the fact, and even went so far as to accept that most people voted reluctantly, and often against, rather than for, something. This leads us to the theme I want to develop further in this essay: that what is wrong with most of the political systems in the West is not a matter of procedures and institutions, and that it is time to stop thinking that tinkering with electoral processes or the details of the political institutions of a country will actually make much difference. Indeed, for all that such tinkering is a subject of transcendent fascination to the PMC, it usually makes the position worse and not better, since it diverts attention from the real problems. There is a fundamental political problem here, and in general I think history shows sufficiently that attempts at technical solutions to political problems simply don’t work.

I’m going to talk a fair bit (but not exclusively) about the French case, because it is the most serious. For reasons I will go into, France may be without a government for nearly a year (the next elections cannot be called until July 2025) and there is no guarantee that a new election then will produce a National Assembly from which a government with a majority can actually be formed. In other words, politics in one of the two or three most important states in Europe may be terminally broken. Now I say “politics” rather than “political system,” since, as I will try to show, it’s not just a technical systemic problem, and attempts to fiddle with the detail to resolve it are pointless. And where France goes today, I rather fear other western states will follow quite quickly.

So let’s begin with Macron’s start-up kingdom. Even with the fighting in Ukraine, the slaughter in Gaza and the chaos in the United States, you’ll probably be aware that there were parliamentary elections in France on 30 June and 7 July. You probably also know that after the second round, there were three principal blocs of parties in the National Assembly, none of them large enough to form a government. You may have heard it said that calling the election was completely unnecessary in the first place, and that even now nobody outside a very tight circle of courtiers has any real idea why Macron did it. Various complicated and imaginative theories have been put forward, but if this really was seven-dimensional chess, then it was an eight-dimensional defeat, as his own party lost a lot of seats and many of the remaining deputies are furious with him. The best explanation is probably that Macron panicked after the kicking his party received in the European elections, and decided on a “me or chaos” approach to the electorate which, unfortunately for him, replied “not you, anyway, mate.”

It’s also possible that you have heard that the government in power until July resigned, and that ever since (with a long break for the summer holidays) there have been efforts to identify a new Prime Minister who could then try to build a multi-party coalition. You may even have heard that this isn’t going well, and that every day brings new accusations, propositions, statistical exercises, personality clashes and even splits (the Socialists seem just to have split once more, though not many people noticed.) There isn’t even agreement on who should try to form a government: the “leftist” coalition, the Nouveau front populaire is, if you count in a particular way, the largest bloc, and so should by convention be asked to try to form a government. But it didn’t “win” the elections, as you may have been told: it’s just a scratch coalition of very divergent parties, which has an uneasy pole position for the time being. The largest individual party in the National Assembly is Le Pen’s party, the Rassemblement national (RN) and there’s no way she will ever be asked to form a government. So Macron’s party continues in government, without any prospect of a majority, transacting “current business” only. As we go to print, Macron has been “consulting” about a new Prime Minister, but, even if one is nominated this week, there’s little chance they will actually be able to form a government: as we shall see, the numbers don’t add up.

Now I’ll come back to some of the more detailed lessons to draw from this ghastly mess later, but first I want to look at some much more generic issues, beginning with an extremely simple but seldom-discussed question: if we say we want to live in a democracy, what do we mean by that term?  Ask a Political Scientist and they will immediately start talking about free elections, voting systems, parliamentary organisation, legislation, voting rights and so on. If you ask them what these arrangements and institutions are actually for, though, you’ll get a puzzled look. As you might expect from a Liberal/PMC  society, the focus for some time now has been on the technical aspects of running a parliamentary system, their alleged weaknesses, and how they might be improved. It’s uncritically assumed that technical changes can repair, or at least reduce, the alienation of ordinary people from the system operated by their rulers. Most arguments circle around a small number of alternatives: there has been pressure in France for some time to move to a Proportional Representation system because of its asserted strengths, just as it is losing popularity in other European countries because of its demonstrated weaknesses.

The debate is usually conducted entirely, or at least mainly, on a theoretical level. So First-Past-the-Post, or winner-take-all, voting is generally thought to provide “strong government” with continuity. Proportional Representation is generally agreed to be “fairer,” in that a parliament will more probably reflect the real level of support for different parties in the country, and allow smaller parties a voice. Regional list systems are often described as the “best compromise.” And so on. The merits of a directly elected President, a President elected by Parliament or a hereditary Head of State have generated a lot of argument. But again, much of this debate resembles arguments about which was the best fighter aircraft in the Second World War, or whether Ayrton Senna was a greater driver than Max Verstappen: all very interesting, but of no practical use, unless you first explain how the conclusions are relevant to your conception of what democracy is, and how it should work.

And you find fundamental dissatisfaction with the outputs of the political system in virtually every country, irrespective of the technical characteristics of that particular system. Like many people who once worked for the British government, I was (and am) a lukewarm Republican, because in government you very quickly see the negative effects of royal power and influence. Yet as time passed, it became clear that, curiously, the Royals were one of the last holdouts against the brutalism of neoliberalism, and for the preservation of traditional values of duty and community. It was this, perhaps, that made so many French people of all political persuasions say to me “you are so lucky to have a Queen in your country.” In turn, ordinary French people follow news about the Royals closely, and many millions watched the wall-to-wall coverage of the recent funerals and the Coronation of Charles III. To be fair, this was at least in part because of contrast with the poor quality of recent French Presidents: Sarkozy (2007-12) was a slimy, corrupt provincial lawyer escaped from a Balzac novel, whereas Hollande (2012-17) was a colourless bureaucrat with the charisma of a soggy baguette, and of Macron there is nothing of interest to say at all.

It’s always a case of seeing virtue in what you don’t have. So the progressive decline of UK politics in recent decades has produced a type of sour, almost vindictive republicanism, which implies that all the problems of the country could be cured if we only wheeled out the guillotines. This led to a rather unsavoury period of lip-smacking gleeful celebration of Royal deaths and several generations of the Royal Family suffering from cancer. (Another one bites the dust!). Yet more recently, I’m fairly sure that some of these same people have woken up sweating with fear in the middle of the night muttering to themselves President Boris Johnson, President Boris Johnson! As I always say, be very careful what you ask for, because you might get it. (George Orwell, you may recall, thought that a genuinely Socialist government in Britain would abolish the House of Lords but keep the Monarchy.)

Of course, it’s very difficult for the PMC to accept that the massive political problems of most western countries today have deeper roots than mere technical deficiencies, because that puts the Liberal PMC ideology and the last forty years of neoliberal brutalism in the spotlight instead. For example, the wholesale privatisation of state assets has turned critical sectors of the economy and daily life into organisations aimed at short-term financial maximisation rather than the provision of services. In turn this has led to the spread of a private sector mentality into what was  the public sector and a corresponding fall in ethical standards As I’ve argued on many occasions “professionalisation” of politics has led to narrow, incompetent political figures coming to power and the development of what I call The Party in place of traditional political formations. Corruption is now much more of a problem than it was, simply because the opportunities for corruption are greater. With more interchanges between public and private, with an assumption that politics is just a career stop you profit from later, and with the need in many political systems to raise money to get elected, corruption is inevitable, and cannot be addressed by technical rule changes or “oversight” bodies. To cure this and other problems you have to go deep into the composition of politics and society themselves.

So then, if democracy is not about structures and processes and rules and percentages, what is it about? And what is the role of structures etc. in it, if any? I’m not intending to conduct a long discussion about the nature of democracy here, and I would discourage commenters from doing so. Let’s simply say that a democracy exists when the wishes and wants of the citizens are as far as possible translated into the characteristics and functioning of the society in which they live. The rest is technical detail, and the transmission mechanisms for making this happen are of secondary importance to the result. So we can consider this, once more, as an engineering problem. The inputs are the wants and desires of the citizens, the output is the satisfaction of those wants and desires, and there is thus a need for a process, the operation of a machine if you like, which will bring the output as close to the input as possible.

Obviously, there are always going to be practical problems. We are no longer in ancient Athens, where citizens could vote directly on issues, and referenda, for all that they can be very useful, cannot by themselves be a system of government. Governments have to deal with many other pressures and factors (including practicality) as well as public opinion, which is itself often divided. At a minimum, therefore, we need a skilled and experienced bureaucracy to put popular desires into practice to the degree that that is practicable. We also need some mechanism for providing this bureaucracy with political direction about how to satisfy the wants of ordinary people. But whether this actually requires a professional political class such as we have today is very much an open question, albeit not one we have time to go into here. Many societies in history have thought otherwise.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, most western countries today have a crisis of governability. The Party, with its elitist neoliberal ideology, is now divided into factions which have retained old political party names and invented a few new ones, but which differ only in matters of emphasis. Their policies are not in the interest of the majority of voters, which is why in many countries now, the majority of voters don’t vote. Those who do vote come either from the ten per cent or so which actively benefit from the Party’s policies, a somewhat greater percentage, often middle-class pensioners, who fear losing even that which they have, and a residue who vote from nostalgia for parties they used to support in the past, or simply to express disapproval of others. In some countries, nonetheless, parties and candidates have arisen from outside the Party, and often succeed in mobilising a large number of voters. But the Party and its media parasites, scared of what they cannot control, have so far managed to prevent them establishing themselves in power. In the face of such a degree of alienation of the people from the political class, the  approved solution is … tinkering with the details of the system. After all, anything else would be to admit that this alienation was real and that it was the Party’s fault.

As I’ve said, the case of France is particularly instructive, because disillusion with the political class has now reached such a point that historically low numbers of French people even bother to vote, and this in a country where politics has always been taken seriously. (Ironically, the uptick in participation in July was linked to more, people voting for the RN. Oh dear.) After the pointless two-round National Assembly elections, then on the evening of 7 July, the French political system found itself blocked in a way that twenty years ago would have been thought impossible.  Now it’s true that French politics has always been factional, and that, apart from the mighty Communist  Party in its heyday, French political parties have themselves been coalitions of actors, often gathered around individual politicians. (Just today, I read that the leader of a breakaway faction of the traditional right-wing party Les Republicans is now going to form a new party: this happens all the time.) Even so, the disintegration of French political life represented by the current National Assembly is extraordinary: the more so since it has little to do with the actual divisions in the country, and a lot to do with egos and jealousies.

Just running through the numbers can make you dizzy. But the point of departure is that there are 577 seats in the National Assembly, and so a bare majority requires a government to be able to count on half of them plus one, or 289 seats. Until 2022, this generally happened, although party discipline and factionalism being what it is, governments generally needed more than that to be secure. Since 2022, the coalition of parties supporting Macron has not had a majority, and have been forced to rely on ad hoc deals with the rightwing Republicans. In the 2024 elections, things became catastrophically worse for Macron’s gang. Let’s have a look at the raw numbers. Of the 577 seats, the largest group is the NFP, that hastily assembled “leftist” alliance with 193 seats. Next is Ensemble the group generally supporting Macron with 166 seats, and then Le Pen’s RN and its allies with 142. Two things are obvious: first, no group is anywhere near the 289 seats needed to form a government, and second, that the totals don’t add up to 577. Where are the others? Well, there are about another dozen parties, some with only one member, who have formed themselves into “groups” to benefit from various advantages in the National Assembly. The only one of any size is The Republicans with 48 seats. (You may find slightly different numbers depending on the date of the information: deputies join and leave groups all the time.)

Now if this seems confusing, the detail is worse, and I will spare you most of it. Suffice it to say that each of the main groups is a coalition itself. The NFP “group”has four main parties and several tiny ones, with major policy differences between them. Macron’s gang consists of three separate parties and some independents. And Le Pen’s group includes refugees from the Republicans, who now constitute a new but allied party. So, whilst it would be theoretically possible for two of the groups to reach an agreement and dominate the Assembly, these groups actually find it impossible to agree even amongst themselves on most things. The NFP, in particular, is held together essentially by fear of the electoral consequences if it splits.

This hasn’t stopped journalists and pundits from playing the fascinating and absorbing game of Design Your Own Government. Let’s start with faction A of party B, let’s add faction F, and let’s add factions Q and R of party C, and factions Y and Z of party D. That makes, oh, 250 seats, which is not enough, but perhaps others will support this coalition on an occasional basis. And so the silly game goes on, the only hard and fast rule being that the RN and its allies must not be allowed into government. This requires 289 supporters  to be found from 435 deputies (fewer in practice actually), which is impossible. That, essentially is the problem, more than a fancied “coup” by Macron, or his refusal to allow the “leftist” group to put forward a candidate for Prime Minister. In fact, once again, nobody really understands what Macron is up to here: if he had invited someone from the NFP to try to form a government, they would fail, and the NFP would suffer as a result. In the meantime, the existing government is still dealing with “current business” and may carry on for months, or even years. Oh, and they can’t be dismissed through a vote of confidence, because they have already resigned. The blockage is complete. But why did it happen? For that, we need to go beyond numbers, because  the problems are with the nature of the political system itself and with its leaders, and these problems are a variation of those found elsewhere as well.

Broadly, politics in France have followed the standard progression, where the major parties have coalesced around a vaguely neoliberal social and economic agenda, with differences more about personalities than politics. On the Notional “Left”the traditional middle-class electorate mostly switches back and forth between the Socialists, the Greens and the latest incarnation of Macron’s party, and often just doesn’t vote. The working class electorate has largely gone to the RN. The traditional voters of the “Right” switch between Macron’s party and the Republicans or just don’t vote either. For class reasons not many vote for the RN.

During the recent election campaign, the only real objective of all of these parties, and indeed of virtually the whole of the French political system, was to keep the RN out of power, and to avoid it becoming the largest single party in the National Assembly, so enabling the existing patterns of power and patronage to remain intact. After a series of squalid back-room deals this objective—the only thing that really mattered—was accomplished, and the RN and its allies eventually won perhaps a hundred fewer seats than they would have expected to. In the week after 7 July, there was a collective sigh of relief by the French political class that the crisis had been averted and they could go off on holiday untroubled.

And ever since, in spite of the gesticulating and the would-be dramatic initiatives, nobody really seems bothered that France doesn’t really have a government. Yet in fact, this complacent attitude is quite logical given the circumstances, and tells us a lot about how the modern western political class thinks. The fact is that anyone who tries to form a government will almost certainly fail, and any government that is formed will lurch from crisis to crisis. To be asked to form a government in the present circumstances is like being given a hand grenade that can explode at any moment. (Lucie Castets, the former bureaucrat put forward as the “Left’s” candidate for Prime Minister, is best seen as a pawn sacrifice: no-one with real ambition for the future would take the job.) 

So in spite of the dramatic protestations from the Notional “Left,” it’s doubtful whether their leaders really want to try to form a government, not least because they know there is no chance of even their own parties agreeing on issues of practical policy. Better to stand back and let others discredit themselves. Of course this doesn’t mean that pretending to be ready to form a government is a bad idea, especially since it allows them to try to undermine Macron’s position by depicting him as authoritarian and arbitrary. Indeed, it’s likely that the real reason for these manoeuvres is to try to bring Macron down, and to this end the most voluble part of the Notional “Left,” Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France insoumise (LFI) has begun the process of “destitution,” roughly equivalent to impeachment, linked with planned strikes and demonstrations around the country. This stands no chance of succeeding, but it generates useful publicity and, most importantly, prepares the ground for Mélenchon’s own run for President in 2027, if not earlier.

There’s a similar lack of urgency elsewhere in the political system. Le Pen’s party is not ready for government (indeed there was a Machiavellian scheme being floated earlier in the year that the RN should be allowed into power as a way of destroying and discrediting them terminally.) Their campaign was often unprofessional and some of their candidates were distinctly unsavoury. Best wait for 2027. And of course Macron and co. have everything to gain from the crisis continuing, and their enemies being discredited and their coalitions coming apart. So there’s no hurry really: look to 2027, the more so since between Ukraine, Gaza, EU problems and the next epidemic, no sane person would want to be in government themselves, if the alternative was watching your enemies self-destruct.

Thus, as elsewhere in the western world, the supply of establishment political candidates and policies does not correspond to the popular demand, and ordinary people become increasingly angry and alienated from the system. But where do they go? In the case of France, they go to what are referred to as the “extremes” by their critics, so let’s look briefly at them. The easier to understand is Le Pen’s RN. Here, we note the difference between the fundamental appeal of a political party, and its ability to deliver. In reality, there’s not a lot that’s extreme about the RN today: its policies are those of the centre-right a generation ago. Its appeal lies in the fact that it is the only mass party in France that sounds as if it listens to, and is interested in, the concerns of ordinary people. That said, a RN government now would be a disaster: they simply do not have the depth of talent necessary and it’s not clear that they can develop it easily. Voting for the RN will ultimately destroy the existing system if taken to its logical conclusion, but the party itself probably does not have the political skills to benefit from the wreckage.

At the other end of the spectrum, and also dubbed “extremist” by the majority of French people, is Mélenchon’s LFI. The party is a curious beast, led by someone who sees himself as a charismatic leader, but who is actually incapable of leading. A former Trotskyist, Mélenchon is quite capable of purging his enemies in backroom manoeuvres, as he showed at the last election, but lacks any real management and leadership skills. Worshipped by his youthful palace guard, who view him as their parents and grandparents viewed Castro and Allende, he is incapable of imposing any real policy discipline on his restless and hydra-headed party. However, the party is primarily an extension of his own ego, with no collective management or policy-making structure, and everything is decided personally by the leader.

But it’s not a party with mass appeal. In a recent large-scale survey, only 25% of respondents said the party was “close to their concerns,” whereas around 70% thought that it “provoked violence” and was unfit to run the country. (The RN has somewhat better ratings in these areas, although it is also unpopular with many.) What’s striking is that the bedrock of LFI support, according to this survey, comes from two very disparate sources: the very young (18-24 year olds) and the Muslim community. At first sight, this seems bizarre, since their “concerns” are inevitably very different. Actually, it is a good illustration of the impossibility of constructing a coherent political movement from fragments of today’s alienated society, each with their own, irreconcilable objectives.

The “concerns” that Muslims feel LFI is close to, in their patriarchal and religious-dominated society, are essentially very socially conservative ones. Effectively, they would re-create the France of a century ago: segregated education, criminalisation of abortion and homosexuality, and a woman’s place is in the home. Their power structure tells them to vote LFI partly because it takes an explicitly pro-Hamas line, but mainly because it has been ready to echo Islamist demands for more religious influence on daily life in France (although of course Mélenchon and his youthful cohorts think they are just defending a persecuted minority, or something.) Meanwhile, local Muslim LFI politicians are starting to flex their muscles over proposals like introducing segregation in swimming pools. LFI would also be incapable of governing, and in any case, its maximum potential vote is considerably smaller than that of the RN. It could not come to power democratically. Mélenchon may well realise this, since he has been talking about pitting the “New France” of immigrants, sexual minorities and young graduates against, well, everybody else, in some unspecified kind of confrontation.

In other words, even at the “extremes” of French politics, there is no real chance of alternative, coherent forces capable of running the country actually developing. But surely, you ask, there must be a solution somewhere? What about changing the electoral system to one in which the people have more confidence? Well, the idea of proportional representation has been around for a while, and has been seriously discussed for the last decade or so. But there’s a problem, which is that proportional representation gives more seats to the most popular parties closest to the public mood. This would have meant that the RN would be by some measure the largest party in the National Assembly, which is unacceptable. The boutique factions of the Party will not tolerate the electoral success of other parties based on nothing more than popular support. So what about a “Sixth Republic,” another popular theme of the last couple of decades, one in which the President would be less powerful? The trouble is, there’s nothing in the Constitution of the present Republic that makes the President especially powerful: it’s mostly custom and habit. Macron’s behaviour since 7 July has not violated any provision of the Constitution: nothing obliges him to ask any particular individual to form a government, for example. In the end, these are just games of “let’s pretend.”

This leads us to a simple conclusion. Politics is not, and should not be, a purely technical activity. At most, it’s a transmission mechanism to enable the wishes of the people to be given concrete expression. But for this to happen, these wishes have to be articulated and organised in some way, and indeed this was the function of political parties in the past. They were organised expressions of the interests and attitudes of different parts of the society and, at best, they sought to promote and safeguard these interests. They and their leaders had, therefore, to be embedded to some degree in society. In turn, society had to be sufficiently organised both geographically and socially into coherent interest groups which political parties could seek to represent.

None of that is true today. Neoliberalism has largely succeeded in destroying any concept of a society of coherent groups, replacing it with a mass of alienated, utility-seeking consumers, compulsorily ascribed to newly-invented and marketed “identities.” Political parties these days operate like product manufacturers, targeting market segments with differential advertising. Understandably, therefore, the “consumers” of politics move from party to party as they might move from brand to brand. A fractured society will inevitably produce a fractured political system, and there are no technical solutions to that. In the end, all genuine political struggles are articulations of social struggles, by, or on behalf of, authentically existing groups. So this year we commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the crushing of the 1984 miners’ strike in the UK; the last stand of organised labour against the brutalities of Thatcherism. But what was striking about that episode was the social solidarity within and between mining communities: the men manned the picket lines and supported other strikers while the women somehow kept families together and food on the table. I suspect that for anyone born after, say, 1980, this must sound like a historical novel. The social, and even family structures have long disappeared, and these days feminists would be bused in to explain to the women that their real enemies were their husbands and the patriarchy, not the government and the employers.

The political machinery that should turn the aspirations and priorities of the people into facts has stopped working, and no amount of fiddling with dials and switches can get it going again. All the evidence is that when the existing mechanisms of a state and political system no longer produce the desired result, people will look around for alternatives. In spite of hand-waving assertions to the contrary, there is no reason to suppose that the domination of the Party will last forever, any more than any other political system has. Its own internal weaknesses, its incompetence and the fact that the Outer Party may finally be turning against the Inner Party, mean that its effective end could come in a matter of years. Yet in the case of France, certainly, there are no groups outside the existing system that have the organisation and the expertise to take and hold power: rather, they will destroy, but be unable to create. So to adapt Gramsci, the old is dying but the new may never be born. Instead, we may find a field of ruins.

This would be, of course, the opportunity of the century (at least) for a populist party of the genuine Left to arise, and the Party itself is much more afraid of this than of any alleged “fascists” on the other side of the spectrum. In France, a few brave souls like Fabien Roussel the Communist Party leader and François Ruffin (who left LFI in disgust) are trying to create a left-populist discourse, but are being drowned with derision, not least by the Notional Left itself. So the impetus will inevitably come from the Right, and it’s not going to be funny.

It would be much wiser of the Party to make concessions to populist Left ideas now, because they are not going to like the alternative when it happens. But then no-one ever accused them of being overly intelligent. I’ve become convinced, in fact, that with the machine seizing up as it has, those who make a populism of the Left impossible will make a populism of the Right inevitable.