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.