We must be pragmatic open and innovative

The ups and downs that have marked the election of the first Secretary of the Socialist Party are reasons peculiar to the PS, its history, its current, to its "elephants", but probably also to the difficulty of defining, in 2008, an opposition party.

A first reason is changes in the way in which power is exercised. Can the analysis proposed by Michel Foucault in the 1970s. From a "sovereign" type a "normalizer" power power Each type of power is a different form of politicization.

In the case of the sovereign power, which, after General de Gaulle, François Mitterrand was probably the last incarnation, political issue is the State to be taken by the election or revolution. The political project is to give the community of citizens a good shape. It is naturally ideological: a certain vision of the State may oppose in another. And political power has the legitimacy to impose all his vision of the general interest. Political power decides, slice, divided, nationalized if necessary. In this configuration, the resistance provided by the invocation of rights to limit the sovereign surpouvoir.

In the normalizer power, the forms of politicisation are very different. Political power does not seek both to impose a vision to marry individual passions, who become in all eligible principle to recognition, and trends in society. In this form of policy, the people began to distance from the power of State, the individual is a citizen, political life began at the service of private interests, the State found its end in the development of the "civil society". For the citizen, who wants to satisfy his interests private, it is more so to take the power to state than to take power on the power. This is the era of the lobbies: get, without having to exercise it, that the power of State Act in the sense that you wish to.

In this figure, political power is much lower that the citizen is remote. The power is trolling. It is the mode of marketing: probe and follows. So that any ideological reference becomes an obstacle. We must be pragmatic, open and innovative. Is no reason to change those who govern as long as they maximize utility. Citizen itself aspires to be in the standard, even if the standards have to be multiple.

In this universe, the opposition becomes a private matter that expects nothing from the State. It takes the form of the deviance of dissent from the denial of preformed identities. Those who continue to focus on the power of State, the men and women politicians, it requests Ranger ideologies, which could engage the country in is what adventure when it comes to increase the well-being of everyone.

The crazy week of the election of Martine Aubry has shown that the PS did not decide between the assertion of ideological positions of "left", a kind of meaning pure in which those who rely on it would be in penalty to give meaning and a pragmatism that refers to the vision of economists for that well-being is the only criterion of truth, with their head Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Managing Director of the IMF. He was not sure that the invocation of "democracy" allows the synthesis between two worlds also heterogeneous.

In search of a way of opposition, the PS is not the Woods. The privatization of the policy, in a world open Furthermore, comes in a displacement effect forms of opposition that Albert o. Hirschman has conceptualized once in between confrontation and speech "voice" practices to those that characterize the consumer market: the defection "exit" , which is to change provider, to be disloyal, unfaithful, i.e. to vote with his feet. In a post-idéologique world, the citizen consumes policy. If it is not satisfied, it idiot-proof.

The defection puts politics in a situation of radical illegitimacy. He ousts the sort of himself and the forced, as any enterprise business, to seduce, the capture, the flatter. But how to continue policy in a universe denying in its classical form In seeking to politicize the individual desires. Is this not the formula that Ségolène Royal has sought to experiment in the presidential campaign through participatory democracy Internet would pick up this democracy crumbled, gathered, resume a political form.

Martine to Ségolène, it can be seen the large gap of a PS caught between nostalgia for its origins and the reality of contemporary politics. But Nicolas Sarkozy is not except a difficulty that led, also sometimes acrobatic gymnastics figures, but he knew until then control.