Barely a year ago in France, the Rassemblement National came out on top in the European elections ; the President then announced the dissolution of the Parliament, opening up the possibility of a far-right government – a hypothesis that until then had seemed unlikely. As everyone working in or with the public sector, we spent a month asking ourselves this dizzying question: if the RN wins, if the state executive implements a far-right program, what shall we do? These questions can only echoe with the context, in more and more countries, of public agents and professionals finding themselves in this situation.
To avoid being left alone in the face of anguish, La 27e Région, together with our friends from Partie Prenante and Vraiment Vraiment agencies, as well as the public agents collective ‘Nos Services publics’, has launched an investigation, in France and elsewhere: “Public agents in times of democratic disruption“. In this interview, we attempt to share our challenges and tribulations in designing this research.
One year on, how do you look back on this period of dissolution?
Sylvine (27th Region): It already seems a long time ago, since the election results have temporarily removed the threat. And yet, the questions we asked ourselves during that intense month continue to haunt us, and obviously echo situations elsewhere in the world, in the United States, but also in Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands…
Nicolas (Partie Prenante): The dissolution was the moment when we realized that the arrival of a far-right government concerned us as citizens, but also as public servants, and that it would have direct consequences on our daily professional lives, on our autonomy and on the content of our actions. This is as true for teachers as it is for police officers, for staff at the Ministry of finances as it is for those at the Ministry of Ecological Transition, for consultants as it is for local authority employees. Since then, it’s been impossible to work without asking ourselves the question: what’s local public action when the State representants are appointed by a RN government?
Yoan (Vraiment Vraiment): It was a moment that revealed both our strength and our vulnerability. Our strength, because a government can’t do much without its administration, without the thousands of public agents who ensure the day-to-day running of the State and public services. Our vulnerability, because if our elected representatives suddenly refused to play by the rules of a constitutional state, we wouldn’t know what to do about it. Write opinion pieces in the newspapers ? Raise public appeals, demonstrate ? Collectively resign ? It’s not easy to know how to react effectively… It’s a sign that we’re not completely ready to deal with such a situation.
Nicolas: Between the two rounds of these elections, we organized an open evening for public servants to share views on the situation and discuss our fears and hopes. The title of the event was “Imagining ways of serving (or not) under a blue-white-brown flag”, and we were a little overwhelmed by the number of registrants… We asked ourselves how we could continue the reflection, to avoid it remaining a one-off event. But it’s not easy! After the elections, we felt very tired, as if after a month of anguish and mobilization, people needed to move on.
Nadège (La 27e Région): But the situation isn’t getting any better. Trump’s arrival in power in the US reminds us that nightmares can become reality. We’re also seeing this in France, where challenges to the rule of law are becoming more visible and more intense. The threat is always there. We asked ourselves how public servants, faced with these situations, saw their work impacted in concrete terms, in the short and medium term, and what initiatives, if any, were taken as reactions.
You are talking of threat, what are you talking about exactly?
Sylvine: That’s the whole question! In the work we’ve been doing over the past year, we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the right terms to use to describe the problem: the arrival of the extreme right in power? A repressive or authoritarian turn? Illiberal drift? Fragilization of the rule of law? It’s far from being a minor question.
Nicolas: Politicizing the problem by associating it with a political party, in France with the RN, means we may be undermining the impartiality of the administration… and fall into the trap that the far-right party is setting for us! That’s what I told myself when I saw public servants posting on social networks at the time of the dissolution: “my job is not compatible with the RN”. And what happens if they win the election?… We’re not here to play partisan politics. The challenge is to distinguish between what comes under the democratic alternation chosen by the voters (which we have to accept, even reluctantly) and what undermines the functioning of democracy.
Yoan: The difficulty lies in objectifying the threat, because anxiety doesn’t always guarantee lucidity. If we overdramatize the situation, we may fight the wrong battle and build lines against imaginary enemies. That’s why we need to investigate, to gather as finally as possible the concrete experience of public agents and people who allow the State to function on a day-to-day basis. That’s our way build our capacity to pinpoint the threat.
In your questionnaire, you talk about democratic disruption. What do you mean by that?
Nicolas: We quickly draw a parallel with climate change. The idea that it’s less a question of a single rupture with a before and an after, but more of a structural and progressive process, with tipping points, delayed effects, generating mechanisms… As with the climate, the challenge is to combine mitigation (the fight against attacks on the rule of law) and adaptation (anticipating future deterioration, in particular to try to protect the most vulnerable).
Nadège: It’s also a way of highlighting the link between the weakening, or even undermining, of public services and the weakening of our democracy. They share common symptoms (the drastic reduction in the capacity of public authorities to act, the penetration of private interests into all spheres of government, etc.) and, in the same way, undermine people’s rights, starting with the most vulnerable.
It’s a catchy phrase, but in concrete terms, what are the problems at work?
Sylvine: It’s precisely to get a better grasp of them that we decided to investigate. Looking at what’s happening both in France and abroad helps us to appreciate the diversity of temporalities: some disturbances are brutal, while others are more discreet and insidious.
Yoan: We started a series of interviews at the time of Donald Trump’s election in the USA. All you had to do was follow the news to read in real time the analysis of his commando operation against the federal administration with Elon Musk’s DOGE. Even if the political and administrative system in the United States is very different from ours, the methods deployed over the last few months have helped us identify the mechanisms at work: on incompetence as a strategy to weaken the state apparatus, on the use of digital data to multiply the effects of the repressive turn, on the neutralization of counter-powers through the effect of sideration, and so on.
Nadège: It’s enlightening, but at this stage it remains rather theoretical and out of touch. The aim of the questionnaire we are proposing is to be more precise and concrete about the changes already at work, to objectify their consequences and to identify the defense mechanisms that may be activated in a given situation.
What are the aims of the questionnaire?
Nicolas: It was conceived as a self-diagnosis tool. For public servants in this situation, it’s a way of taking stock of the situation, to be more clear-sighted. Each question is an invitation to pay attention to what you see and experience, to point out where things are going wrong and to clarify the level of seriousness. When we designed the questionnaire, we drew a parallel with the “violence barometer” used to qualify sexist and sexual violence: seen from afar, the scale of violence may seem obvious, but in real-life situations we’re swimming in fog.
Yoan: The aim is also to consolidate feedback from the field and accumulate evidence, so as to transform the individual experience of these disturbances (which are often a source of suffering and loss of meaning at work) into collective action. It’s also a question of overcoming the isolation of each structure to succeed in putting up a united front in the face of threats that weaken them all.
Sylvine: The third objective is to identify and share the individual and collective strategies put in place in the field to deal with these disruptions. We didn’t want to get ahead of ourselves on the “what to do” question. The right answer depends on the context, so it’s different every time. On the other hand, we do have a stake in learning from each other, and in networking these localized struggles.
What happens next? What are you going to do with the answers you gather?
Nicolas: It’s a “work-in-progress”. The idea is first to test and make this violence barometer more robust: do the hypotheses we’ve made hold true in the field? Which democratic dysfunctions have been left in the blind spot and which have fallen by the wayside? How may we agree on the scale of seriousness?
Nadège: In a second phase, we’ll be organizing collective discussion sessions. This will also be an opportunity to identify priorities for the future, based on needs: setting up an observatory to make these democratic disturbances visible as seen from the field? Facilitate informal mutual aid to hold out and resist? Take more coordinated action?
If you are a public agent / professional working with public institutions and share our concerns and/or are confronted with situations that echo, please share your experience through this questionnaire : We’re looking forward to more discussions ; nevertheless, we won’t share any information publicly unless the information is anonimised.
