Direct democracy from the shack to the municipal elections in Commercy: giving an institutional role to the assembled people

Since the rise of participatory democracy, mechanisms to enhance public participation in existing institutions have been designed by policy-makers. As such, social movements have rarely been the authors of how this participation could work. Democracy-driven governance has upended this trend. This upsurge begs the question: what are the institutions that movements themselves envision to allow the people to have a say over public life? The purpose of this article is to show how a movement aiming to establish direct democracy in the form of assemblies at the local level designed the institution that would give power to the people, that is, how a movement gave an institutional role to the assembled people. Emerging from the Yellow Vests movement and presenting a list to the municipal elections to give the power to the popular assembly, the assembly movement in Commercy undertook such a task. Based on an extensive fieldwork in Commercy combining participant observation, semi-structured individual and collective interviews and thematic analysis, this contribution is structured in three parts. The first part traces the evolution of the experiment of Commercy, from the beginning of the Yellow Vests assemblies occupying the city’s public space until March 2019, to the Commercy Citizens’Assembly that decided to present candidates to the municipal elections of March 2020. The second part argues that though this experiment can be qualified as democracy-driven governance, the democratic political project at its core goes beyond participation, as it is one of direct democracy, and more specifically, of communalist direct democracy. Indeed, insofar as it aims to radically change the logic of power by giving an institutional role to the assembled people, so that it can directly form its will and decide on public matters, the experiment of Commercy goes beyond only involving citizens to improve the quality of democracy. It rather aims to give back the entirety of political power to the citizens, without leaving any decision-making power to the elected people, rather than only involving them on some aspects of public power while leaving the rest of the power to the policy-makers. The goal is to fundamentally alter the paradigm of democracy, from a representative one to a direct one, rather than improve it. The third part aims at uncovering what is happening when a social movement takes in hand the task to create a new process of direct democracy to institutionalise it. It analyses more specifically how the movement answered in the Local Constitution they collectively drafted one of the numerous problems any direct democracy movement would face, namely that of participation. As such, this contribution enables to understand how this movement undertook to give an institutional role to the assembled people by endorsing a constituent role. Even though this experiment did not succeed in coming into power, precluding the possibility to analyse how this institution could have worked in practice, and its link with established state institutions, the reflection about how the institution of the assembly could be designed allows to capture the process of collective autonomy.