Top French Socialist Candidates Debate Using Citizen Juries to Make Officials Accountable to the Public

By David Litvak

The leading candidate in the French Socialist Party primary, Ségolène Royal, has recently suggested using citizen juries, whose members would be selected at random, to keep a check on elected officials. During a debate at La Sorbonne on October 22nd, Mrs. Royal proposed a “popular surveillance” on elected officials by Citizen Juries to make elected officials more accountable towards the people.

This is not her idea alone. It was previously suggested in Pierre Rosanvallon’s book “Contre-démocratie” (2006). She also claimed that such regular citizen juries would compel electoral discourse to be more realistic, since they would serve as an institutionalized form of post-electoral accountability. Mrs. Royal states: “On the institutional level, I think that we should clarify the means by which elected officials should be rendered accountable at regular intervals by using citizen juries whose members would be selected by lot.” This type of public check on government between elections, if effectively put into place, would be a first in representative democracy.

A Battle "Royal"

Royal’s idea, however, immediately provoked strong reactions both within her own party and amongst right-wing political opponents. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Royal’s main rival within the Socialist Party in the upcoming national primary, warned that “It would be extremely disorderly to have assemblies on one side who would criticize another assembly that, for its part, would have been elected.” André Laignel, an aide to the other Socialist primary candidate, Laurent Fabius, accused Royal of “anti-parliamentarism”.

Valérie Pécresse, spoke-person for the UMP, the main right-wing party in France, indicted Royal of “demagogy” and “populism”, and denounced her plan for Citizen Juries as “a set-back for democracy”. Other critics, like Guillaume Peltier of the Movement for France, another right-wing political group, have been more virulent, branding the proposal as “Maoism” and “post-revolutionary demagogy”.

For her part, Royal has been quick to react to these critics, affirming that: “This is not a movement in defiance of elected officials” since these juries would not have “sanctioning powers,” but only “evaluation” powers concerning public policies, actually “helping elected officials to accomplish their mandate”. On her campaign’s web site (http://www.desirsdavenir.org/), she adds that : “My whole political experience convinced me of the obsolescence of certain ways of governing. Many good intentions are lost, because measures, dealt with in closed circles, miss their objective. They lack a shared diagnostic of the problem and a collective decision-making process.”

 What are Royal’s Chances To Win

Polls indicate that Ségolène Royal has a comfortable lead over Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Laurent Fabius in the upcoming 16th of November Socialist Party’s primary (OpinionWay, CSA). Recent polls on the probable scenario of a second round of voting opposing Royal to Nicolas Sarkozy of the UMP in the 2007 presidential elections are contradictory. The two last polls, both published on the 19th of October, either give Sarkozy a six point lead (Ifop) or Royal a two point lead (TNS).

David Litvak