Grandstand. Polls suggest high abstention in the next presidential election. In the last municipal elections, one out of two voters had abstained; two out of three during the regionals. Six weeks before the next election, more than half of French people were unaware of its date!
Faced with this lack of interest in elections, which poses a serious threat to democracy, many countries are now turning to innovative solutions giving citizens new capacities to act.
What is it about ? While President Macron announces that he wants to develop citizen participation in France if he is re-elected, without giving more details, knowing the experiences already carried out in different countries sheds light on the field of possibilities. Born in Brazil at the end of the 1980s, disseminated in South America in the 1990s, these methods are in fact now used in countries as diverse as South Korea, Canada, Germany, Portugal, etc.
Mobilization of young people and the poorest
It all starts with calls, launched in a given territory, on subjects that can concern all sorts of areas: culture, solidarity, infrastructure… Citizens (individuals or groups) respond with proposals.
In order to eliminate those that are unrealistic from a budgetary or technical point of view, a first sorting is carried out by a collective made up of elected officials, civil servants and citizens. The projects deemed admissible are then debated by an ad hoc assembly before being submitted to the vote of the inhabitants. The most popular are implemented.
This type of approach has interesting results. Research has shown that they succeed in mobilizing young people and the poorest people, populations who vote particularly little. By getting residents to discuss subjects that concern them directly, it involves them more than the election of a representative.
The method also helps to fight against corruption, because citizens, who thus have the possibility of choosing between different public investments, then become involved in the monitoring of projects, and control them more.
The risk of pressure groups
In France, experiments have been launched on a small scale in recent years. Paris has had participatory budgets since 2014, Grenoble since 2017, Bordeaux since 2019. Small towns and departments also use them, such as the Gers, which has devoted, since 2018, 3% of its investment budget to projects proposed, chosen and controlled by citizens.
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