A Republic Desecrated

Last September 12, when I saw the number of demagogic populists elected as MPs, I first had a sad thought for the Republic. Then I smiled when I remembered a recent sentence of a French parliamentarian. Concerned about the number of National Front members in the Palais Bourbon, he said: « It looks like Nuremberg during rush hour. »

When populists arrive in numbers in a National Assembly, they have two targets: the National Assembly itself, a high place of democratic debate which they do not believe in, and the Republic, which is their ultimate adversary and which they seek to destroy in order to impose a totalitarian state. The mess caused by the elected representatives of the Nation has deeply moved me.The crime against decency, balance and measure that the exercise of the State requires informs on the clouds of uncertainty that threaten the Senegalese democracy. Authoritarian populism is a danger for democratic societies. The United States, Brazil, Italy and Hungary are experiencing it. It attacks societal balances by putting the citizens of a same nation face to face. Today, in Senegal, a cohort of enthusiasts is playing the game of confrontations between friends and enemies of the Nation, between the virtuous and the traitors, as if the unity of the national bloc should be broken, using lies and manipulation in the name of fascism, which drapes itself -like all fascism– in the mantle of patriotism. These same people choose to desecrate all the institutions of the Republic in order to propagate the chaos that precedes dictatorship, which is the ultimate goal of populists.

Patriots are all those who think that Senegal, this great Nation, must remain and survive the sad passions of a guru and his sect. To love the country is to regret seeing intolerance and the expression of physical and verbal violence threaten the common desire to live together that is so dear to the old poet who founded the Nation. To be patriotic is to sacralise the republican customs, including the maintenance of the sacredness of the Hemicycle, which should be a place of enlightened dispute, of fertile controversy, of parliamentary obstruction, which is part of the political game, but without ever falling into the barbarity of physical violence. I was saddened to see the town hall of Yeumbeul Sud ransacked by people who should be prosecuted and punished. But what I saw on September 12, is worse in terms of the decrepitude of public morality. Elected representatives of the Nation who ransack the Parliament, exercise violence on other elected representatives, in front of the world’s television stations, and push the Army to take over the Hemicycle for the first time in the history of Senegal, constitute the symbol of the democratic collapse that we are living.

What happened in the Parliament is proof of the danger that populism represents for democracy and especially for countries with a fragile democracy like ours. A friend told me how ashamed he was of the unbearable images. Another told me that Senegal does not deserve this. I didn’t try to contradict nor reassure them, even though I myself did not expect such an outpouring of violence. We must mourn the loss of a certain idea of politics in our country. From now on, the public debate will not escape the violence and obscenity that permeate society at levels. We are living the revenge of passions. Rigorous and measured discourse, in the era of the Internet and the proliferation of media whose objective is the permanent buzz, isn’t a great force any more . Lies, manipulation, insults on the networks and publicity stunts have become a norm instead of the nuance and complexity necessary for political discourse. Verbal outrage and the flexing of muscles do not constitute a political project. They are the tools of the mediocre and the ignorant who use them to give themselves a sense of self-importance in the public arena, in defiance of the rules of civility and elegance that should govern political action. The desecration of the National Assembly, a sacred place of the Republic and the heart of democracy, did not worry some political actors. I saw old left-wing activists jubilant, naively, in the hope of a Grand Soirapproaching. Others, happy, insult us and call us republicans by surrounding the word with their fiendish quotation marks.I don’t feel bad for them, they simply cause embarrassment. To normalise the populist mob of September 12 is to open a matchbox to start a fire in the naive belief that we will escape it. It will burn us all.