Part VI - Transition
1 - Initial popular mandate
The transitional phase opens with a founding political act: the accession to power of an authority bearing an explicit project of restoration of national sovereignty. This accession is not defined by a single procedural path, but by an essential condition: the existence of a popular assent sufficiently clear to found the legitimacy of the action undertaken.
In the democratic ideal, this mandate proceeds from suffrage. A clear electoral victory, founded on an assumed programme of sovereign rupture, constitutes the most legible and most peaceful path. It allows the transition to be inscribed within a formal legal continuity, while giving the incoming power the political force necessary to act. But French institutional history recalls that this path is not always practicable: when the system in place is locked, when it disqualifies certain political options or when it proves incapable of responding to a major crisis.
In such circumstances, other forms of accession to power have existed and can exist. The call to power in a period of crisis, on the model of 1958, inscribes itself in the French constitutional tradition: it does not proceed from a coup de force, but from the collective recognition that a regime has reached exhaustion and that a new authority is required to ensure the continuity of the State. This type of shift does not draw its legitimacy from ordinary procedure, but from national necessity and the popular adhesion that accompanies it.
Whatever the modality of entry into office, the initial mandate is strictly defined. It has no vocation to establish an indefinite or personal power, but to conduct a precise mission, limited in time and clearly identified: to restore the effective conditions of national sovereignty and prepare the advent of a stabilized political regime. This transitional mandate is a mandate of refoundation, not of conservation.
Its legitimacy rests on a dual commitment. The commitment to break with the dependencies, constraints and renunciations that have deprived the State of its capacity for decision. And the commitment not to durably confiscate power, but to restore it to a renewed institutional architecture, validated by the nation.
The initial popular mandate is therefore not defined solely by its origin: it is defined by its finality. It is the political birth certificate of the transition; a moment where collective will accepts that an exceptional power be exercised, not to substitute itself for popular sovereignty, but to make it once again possible.