Abstract
One of the forefathers of democratic principles, the French government, is abandoning that heritage, writes
Emmanuel Macron, head of the political movement En Marche !, while he was a candidate for the 2017 French presidential election
CREDIT: Christian Hartmann/Reuters
But right now, France’s democractic leadership is under scrutiny, with journalists being stopped from reporting and new laws giving wide-ranging extra powers to the police. This is all the more worrying since President Emmanuel Macron was elected on a promise to be a liberal, committed to confront the authoritarian trends represented by both the National Front and the radical left, and a pro-European, determined to roll back the populist movements from Hungary to Italy.
Macron, a candidate who upset the traditional and exhausted mainstream parties and stood up to the far right, was expected to have done more by now to set out a new democratic vision.
During the 2017 presidential campaign, Macron promised to be the hero of press freedom. He was described by many journalists as a liberal candidate who would inject some fresh air in a country where the “raison d’état” is not a joke.
The other Statue of Liberty, on the Seine in Paris
CREDIT: Matthieu Photoglovsky/iStock
Since Charles De Gaulle and the inauguration of the Fifth Republic, the French presidency acts as a form of elective monarchy.
President Nicolas Sarkozy (2007-2012) tried to bring the media to heel, and under his remit the directors of public broadcasting were directly chosen by the Elysée and a number of investigative journalists were allegedly put under surveillance by the secret service.
His Socialist successor, President François Hollande (2012-2017) liked schmoozing with the press. He even confided in two Le Monde journalists who published a bestseller whose title said it all: “Un président ne devrait pas dire ça.” (A president should not say that).
Macron appeared to announce a presidency which would not only distance itself from these flawed models of press/power relationships, but also from the media-bashing crowd: Jean-Luc Mélenchon, of the left-wing France Insoumise, and Marine Le Pen, of the far-right National Front. To many, he looked like someone who understood the role of a free press in a modern democratic state.
The honeymoon did not last very long, and soon incidents marred the relationship.
The labour and culture ministers lodged complaints after newspapers Liberation and Le Monde published leaks about the government’s reform plans.
The Elysée also incensed the media when it decided to select the journalists allowed to follow the head of state on foreign trips.
On 23 June 2017, media organisations, from L’Agence France-Presse to Le Monde, signed a joint letter starting with a blunt question: “Has the new executive a problem with press freedom?”, and ending with a blunt statement. “Informing the public is as much a duty as a right. A free and independent press is essential to democracy.”
In July, political columnist Denis Jeambar wrote a gently critical article which was meant as a warning: “Emmanuel Macron, in small brush strokes, puts the press under tension, maintains her at a distance, tries to discredit her, forgetting that the media’s versatility and inconstancy served him well in the last three months of his campaign.
Macron, as Laurent Berger, leader of the centre-left trade union the French Democratic Confederation of Labour (CFDT), said in late April this year, “negates the role of intermediary institutions” such as unions or the media, adding that this was very dangerous.
“He is not a liberal,” said Gaspard Koening, director of the Génération Libre think-tank. “Neither in his understanding of individual freedoms nor in his conception of institutions: he is an umpteenth presidentialist, who adores the authoritarian structure of the Fifth Republic.”
But for a number of public institutions, journalists are personae non gratae. This is not new, but representatives of the state feel free to impose a form of gagging law in the public space, especially during protests – a pattern confirmed by the Index-run Media Mapping Freedom Project showing numerous attempts by police and others to stop journalists covering French protests.
During the April rail strikes, TV crews were forbidden by the French train company SNCF to film and interview stranded passengers unless accompanied by a company “minder”. The “correct” video footage was provided by the communications team. Likewise, during the evacuation of the Notre-Dame-des Landes squatters’ camp (where a new airport had been planned) in early April, the gendarmerie closed the area to journalists and again provided its own videos to the media.
“We firmly condemn the practice of supplying, with the excuse of security, ready-made and sanitised images of undergoing ‘sensitive’ operations by the government,” said the French National Union of Journalists (SNJ).
The Index-run Mapping Media Freedom project has also collected a worrying number of cases of reporters, especially photographers and cameramen, hit by stun grenades or tear gas canisters – and even beaten.
“Since this government has decided to settle the social question with bludgeons, there is not one week without its case of journalists on the ground brutalised by police forces,” said the SNJ.
France is now number 33 on Reporters without Borders’ 2018 World Press Freedom Index, only slightly better than it was under Sarkozy and Hollande. The major issue remains the control exercised by corporate media owners, often very close to the state, on a large chunk of the most influential media.
But, “illiberal” clouds are hovering. There are worries about a bill on trade secrets (secret des affaires) which, they say, threaten whistleblowers and investigative journalism. By early May, the petition to block the law had gathered 550,000 signatures. The state of emergency, which was declared after the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, was followed in November 2017 by a new anti-terror law “to strengthen internal security and the fight against terrorism”, which integrated a number of its most controversial provisions.
Turning the exception into the “new normal” it was adopted over the objections of human rights groups, inter-governmental organisations, leading academics and even of the domestic human rights oversight authority, who deemed it “liberticide”. It was also criticised by the right and far-right, who denounced its “laxness”.
The new law grants wide-ranging powers to police and prefects while weakening judicial scrutiny over how those powers are used. If it lifts the state of emergency prohibition of public demonstrations, restricting such measures to cases where “they threaten public order”, it increases the prefects’ powers to designate public spaces or events as “perimeters of protection” allowing the police to search people, bags and vehicles.
It also allows the police to search people without a warrant in a 20-kilometre radius of ports, airports and international train stations as well as close places of worship without prior judicial authorisation. The surveillance of electronic communications is also reinforced. Even if the law is meant to apply only “with the aim of preventing acts of terrorism”, it is “a false exit from the state of emergency, a real backsliding of the rule of law”, judged the French Human Rights League (LDH).
On 4 January, Macron, who was crudely targeted by disinformation during the 2017 presidential campaign, announced that a new law “on the trustworthiness of information” would be adopted before the next elections in order to promote increased internet transparency, fight fake news and foreign state-sponsored media disinformation.
“It would authorise a judge to block a website to stop the dissemination of what would be deemed fake news,” Macron said.
“It could open a Pandora’s box,” Sylvain Rolland warned in La Tribune. The 1881 press law already bans “false news”, it insisted. And entrusting the state with the power to decide what’s news was not seen as a particularly good idea.
But the president’s mistrust of the media threatens to feed the campaign of denigration which both the far right and the far left have been waging against the “establishment” or “liberal-left media”.
Macron would do well to remember the wise words of his favorite philosopher Paul Ricoeur. “A democratic society is one which acknowledges that it is divided by contradictions of interests, and chooses to associate in equal terms each citizen in the expression, the analysis, the deliberation of these contradictions in order to arrive at an arbitration.” The corollary is clear: a free and independent press matters.
Such commitment to press freedom is strategic for Macron. The far right has been striving to hijack the free speech banner, despite a history of physical attacks on, and legal actions against, journalists. On the internet, the fachosphere (the constellation of far right and national populist websites and twitter accounts) has been regularly slamming the president’s alleged “will to muzzle freedom of expression”.
In order to have more leverage at the European level, he must deprive those populist governments and illiberal parties who oppose his ambition to relaunch the European Union of any alibi.
“In the face of authoritarianism, the response is not authoritarian democracy but the authority of democracy,” Macron said in his April speech to the European Parliament on 17 April in Strasbourg.
There is no other option than to lead by example.
AHEAD OF THE GAME?
Jemimah Steinfeld