Part III - Institutions
9 - Referendums and popular control
On May 29, 2005, the French said no to the European Constitutional Treaty by 54.68%. Three years later, the Treaty of Lisbon - a near-identical text - was ratified through parliamentary procedure without consulting the people. The sovereign decision of the electoral body was deliberately circumvented by the very same people who were supposed to respect it. This is not an institutional anecdote but the demonstration that in the preceding regime, the referendum was not a mechanism of real sovereignty but a consultative tool that those in power could ignore when the answer displeased them.
This project makes that structurally impossible. A decision arising from a referendum cannot be called into question by any institution: neither the reformed Senate, nor the executive, nor any other body. The people decide. The decision applies. Full stop.
What can be subject to a referendum
Everything. The designation and revocation of the king or his heir. The revocation of the government or the Planning Commissioner. Strategic decisions touching on essential sectors. Constitutional questions. The people may modify or amend the institutional framework itself. There is no reserved domain withdrawn from popular judgment. Sovereignty is integral or it is not.
Thresholds - why they are necessary
A permanent referendum would be a democracy of fatigue: every decision contested by an organized minority would become a pretext for consultation, until civic exhaustion and institutional paralysis. Thresholds are not obstacles to democracy, they are its protection. To trigger a citizen-initiated referendum, signatures must represent 10% of the electoral body, collected physically at town halls without possibility of delegation. A territorial condition is added: a minimum quorum of 3% of the electoral body must be reached in a qualified majority of departments. This double requirement prevents the most populous territories from confiscating the process to the detriment of the rest of the country. A minimum period of six months is observed between two referendums on the same subject, to allow considered deliberation rather than a referendum war of attrition.
Quality conditions
A referendum without information is manipulation. Every popular consultation on strategic measures is preceded by the publication of the HCEP's independent analyses. The rules applied to media during electoral periods apply equally. The people vote on the basis of reliable and impartial evaluations, not solely on the basis of government communications or influence campaigns. The debate is transparent, adversarial, accessible to all citizens.
What this fundamentally changes
In the preceding regime, institutions could survive a popular no: it was enough to wait, to reformulate, to go through another route. In this regime, they cannot. The institutions - king, government, Planning Commission, Assembly, Senate - are instruments in the service of the nation. They can alert, initiate, frame. They cannot undo what the people have decided. This is the difference between a procedural democracy and a real democracy.