The French version of populism

Commentating the French presidential election campaign, the political columnist Alain Duhamel remarks that "France is less and less beyond the reach of populism, with its long line of systematic denigration of elites, guilty of all failures, all regressions, but never gratified by progress or success, with its verbal violence too, its diffuse authoritarianism, its outcrop of demagogy, its deliberate simplifications". According to him, France's constitutional structure is amplifying the phenomenon. "For a generation now, France's humus has been sprouting populism. The institutional practice of the 5th Republic is still dramatising the risks with the endless blocking of social dialogue, the aberrant, archaic, destructive absence of any parliamentary control of presidential and governmental action."

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