Translation of the French article by Jacques Rouchaud
Turn on the television. A politician facing a journalist. He talks for five minutes, ten minutes… and he says nothing. Nothing. Well-groomed hot air. The next day, another one recites exactly the same song. Unemployment, security, purchasing power, debt, “we have heard the anger of the French people”… They have been serving us this broken record since 1974. Fifty years of taking us for fools.
While they talk, France is dying.
Fifty years of bankruptcy
One figure should be enough to make them all blush with shame: since 1974, not a single balanced budget. Not one! Left, right, centre, they all swore to “put the accounts back in order”. They all lied. The result: a debt that far exceeds 110% of everything the country produces in a year. And it is our children who will pay the bill.
Great debates, conventions, “Grenelles”, commissions, conferences, seminars… Meeting-mania as a way of governing. They consult, they write a report, they bury it in a drawer. And they start again. The only work they really accomplish is pretending.
Fifty years, six presidents, one single result: failure
Giscard opened the ball. As early as 1974, rather than equipping the unemployed to bounce back, the choice was made to compensate them at almost full salary and leave them waiting. Train, redirect, get people back to work? Too complicated. Social peace was bought with a cheque, and France got into the habit: paying for unemployment instead of fighting it.
Mitterrand built the layer cake. Municipalities, inter-municipal bodies, departments, regions: one more level, more elected officials, more offices, more civil servants. Each with its own budget, each with its own fiefdom, and no one responsible anymore. Then came subsidised contracts, springboard jobs, schemes that go round in circles: unemployment is recycled from one acronym to the next and that is called an employment policy.
What followed only made the disaster worse. Chirac had campaigned on the “social fracture”… then spent twelve years making sure not to make waves. Sarkozy, the bling-bling president, began his reign at Fouquet’s and promised a break with the past: we are still waiting for the break, what we mostly remember is Fouquet’s. Hollande, the “normal president”, swore that his enemy was finance and that he would reverse the unemployment curve: he did not even dare to stand again before the French people. As for Macron, highly cultured, brilliant on paper, but totally cut off from the real country: he knows neither the farm, nor the workshop, nor the end of the month. His dissolution of 2024 plunged the country into chaos, and since then, Prime Ministers have been falling one after another.
Six presidents. Fifty years. Different styles, different slogans… and always the same result: France goes backwards, and they stay.
The kings of the armchair
In recent years, Prime Ministers have been parading past as on a merry-go-round. Governments fall, some do not even survive a single day. But rest assured: they themselves never really fall. The same faces come back, change office, title, ministry. Thrown out through the door, they come back in through the window.
Their only obsession: to survive until the next election. To keep the golden armchair, the chauffeur-driven car, the allowances, the networks. They tremble at the thought of losing their privileges… and always get them back. France is not their mission. It is their livelihood.
The blood that brings in votes
Here is the most sickening truth. The thugs who terrorise our neighbourhoods, burn our cars and loot our shops are never really fought. Why? Because chaos is profitable. Every riot, every tragedy, every image of violence is a free election poster. The extremes, on all sides, feast on it: the bloodier it is, the more votes they rake in. And those who govern close their eyes, because they too make their little calculations.
Turning people’s suffering into ballots is not politics. It is a disgrace.
A country suffocated under laws
A problem? A law. A scandal? A law. A TV programme that makes some noise? Yet another law. In 2025, 62 laws were passed. The Environmental Code has grown from about 250,000 words in 2005 to nearly 1.2 million today. No one can find their way through it anymore: not the citizen, not the mayor, not even the judge. It is no longer a state governed by the rule of law, it is a bazaar.
And our children are growing up in the middle of all this. Lost. Disoriented. They no longer know what is allowed, what is forbidden, whom to trust. How could they know, when those who run the country no longer even know where they are going?
Those who are sacrificed
The farmers are dying. Those who feed us can no longer live from their work. Rock-bottom prices, absurd standards churned out in offices, the Mercosur agreement, entire herds slaughtered. In January 2026, their tractors were once again in Paris. They were received, their hands were shaken, they were smiled at for the cameras. And afterwards? Nothing.
The yellow vests were treated with contempt. Honest French people who were only asking to be able to make it to the end of the month. They were offered a “great debate”. They are still waiting for the answers.
The shopkeepers are ruined. Thirty years of work, of sacrifices, of loans paid back… reduced to ashes in one hour, one night of rioting. Shop window smashed, shop looted, life destroyed. And the next morning? The same hollow speeches, the same show of “firmness”, and no one held responsible.
Enough!
The problem is not one man or one party. The problem is a system rotten to the root, which produces professional politicians whose job is not to solve our problems, but to win the next election. Changing the faces is useless. The system must be changed.
That is what demosciocracy proposes. No more parties. No more ideological campaigns. No more political careers. Power given back to those who live on the ground: citizens and representatives of the trades, drawn from each of the 352 territories. Short mandates. Temporary power, revocable at any time. A government that respects its programme… or gets out. With three non-negotiable principles: Liberty, Equality, Truth.
And this is not just a French matter: wherever peoples are fed up with being the spectators of their own ruin, demosciocracy can be applied.
Fifty years of blah-blah is enough. Those who live the problems must finally be those who solve them.
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