Dince January 19, the people of France have been demonstrating peacefully against the pension reform. Even though the country is emerging scarred and traumatized by the Covid-19 crisis, inflation is putting a strain on household budgets and poverty continues to grow (if 4.8 million French lived below the poverty line in 2020the Secours populaire français estimates that in 2022, they would be 12 million), it nevertheless seems essential for the government to carry out a new pension reform perceived by a majority of French people as unfair and against which they are overwhelmingly hostile.
The crisis of confidence between the French and their representatives is bogged down. However, following the movement of “yellow vests”, after two months of crisis, the President of the Republic, in a letter of January 13, 2019, had invited the French to “transforming anger into solutions”. The great national debate was born. More than 500,000 of our fellow citizens then went to local initiative meetings and recorded their grievances in some 16,000 “citizen notebooks”.
However, contrary to the promises of Emmanuel Macron and his government, no summary of these grievances will be formed and, initially, it will be impossible for citizens to access these documents. Today, only seven metropolitan departments (Somme, Eure, Calvados, Ille-et-Vilaine, Nièvre, Charente-Maritime and Lozère) and certain districts of Paris have made their grievances public.
It is always a real way of the cross for any citizen to be able to access most of these “books”, each time having to make a request to the national or departmental archives. However, what do we find in these “citizen notebooks”? The same demands still shared today by a majority of French people: to live with dignity, to work in good conditions and with fairer remuneration, to be able to enjoy a retirement at a decent age, to limit the effects of global warming, to take greater account of the voice of citizens in public debate.
The democratic ideal
In short, the demands of yesterday are those of today. Between 2019 and 2023, nothing has changed. The ends that we aim for, that we consider necessary and that we have defended since 2020 and the creation of theassociation Make the grievances! refer to the democratic ideal, the only way to respond to the problems of our time. Great national debate of 2019, citizens’ convention for the climate or even debate on the end of life of 2022: the initiatives carrying deliberative democracy as a model are multiplying. It’s better this way.
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