The electoral strategy of communalism

Abstract

This article focuses on one of the outputs of the 2010 assembly-movements: the electoral strategy to run for municipal elections in order to channel city hall’s power to a popular assembly gathering the town’s residents. Though this strategy has been initially fleshed out by the American thinker Murray Bookchin in order to bring about a communalist society – that is, as society in which public power is exercised by the assembled people at the local level – it has been practised in the field in the last years. The movements adopting it are, however, facing a legal and political void. Based on an extensive fieldwork, the article aims to fill this void by looking at the institutional design stemming from the Yellow Vests movement adopting this strategy in Commercy. More specifically, it shows how the movement reinvented the relationship of representation between city hall and the assembled people through imperative mandates.

Keywords

• communalism, municipal elections, assemblies, direct democracy, imperative and recallable mandate