Lutter contre le temps dans l’univers politique

Abstract

Democracy is based on uncertainty. The short duration of mandates obliges politicians to fight against time so as to pursue a political career. It is heuristic to analyse the case of a former mayor of Paris, Jean Tiberi, whose longevity was exceptional, in order to understand the modalities of that fight. Temporal practices allowed him to last, and to remain a member of the Paris local council and of the National Assembly for half a century. He managed to do so thanks to an intense and personalized use of the cumulation of mandates and functions. Two devices were useful to govern time: the stronghold and the driver. They helped the politician to postpone the horizon of the end of his reign on his election territory. The control of the territory is indeed the key to the control of time. That system was costly, in terms of negative media coverage and because of judicial affairs, and it had effects on the way the mandate was exercised: it was exercised in a clientelistic fashion, but mostly in a selective fashion, the involvement of the professional politician in parliament being minimal, and his presence on on a very limited territory increasingly important.

Keywords

• Temporalities
• democracy
• political profession
• local politics
• longevity
• parliament