VSike many French people, the deputies discovered telework during the first confinement: from March 17 to April 27, 2020, only three elected officials per group could access the hemicycle of the Palais-Bourbon. Activities taking place outside the National Assembly have also been disrupted by the Covid-19 crisis.
For several months, the “ videoconferencing has imposed itself in almost all aspects of parliamentary work”, traces the anthropologist Jonathan Chibois, in a study for the Foundation for Social Sciences. It has become the rule in relations with political groups, ministerial cabinets, prefectures and socio-economic, associative or political partners, but also in certain standing committees of the Assembly.
What view do the deputies have, with hindsight, on this unprecedented moment? Their activity is it, according to them, soluble in the new communication technologies? Jonathan Chibois questioned them at length, in the summer of 2022, about this experience. And their answers are very contrasting.
While they all recognize that telework has brought flexibility to their daily lives, while they are pleased that it has made it possible to continue, in exceptional circumstances, parliamentary tasks, while they affirm that it has increased the autonomy of the actors of the National Assembly, they arrive at divergent conclusions: some see it as a threat to parliamentary work, others, on the contrary, an opportunity.
“Powerful” versus “excluded”
For the “powerful” of the Assembly (the deputies of the majority as well as the elected representatives of the urban constituencies, rich and close to the capital), the physical presence in Paris is of a “critical importance”, notes Jonathan Chibois. Because they wage their political fight, not only in the committees and in the Hemicycle, but also upstream – “through strategies of influence in Parisian circles: ministerial work meetings and informal exchanges surrounding committee work or social events” –telework is, for them, very bad news: it deprives them of precious relays within the executive power.
Opposition MPs, who “do not really have the means to dialogue on equal terms with their colleagues from the majority”, as well as the elected representatives of constituencies far from Paris, plebiscite, on the other hand, remote work.
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