France draws lots again
Just months before the 2027 presidential election, France is seeing the launch of three new nationwide citizens’ assemblies. In Lille, the focus is on the future of democracy: In Paris, on major social and political trade-offs – and now also on public finances. The latest Citizens’ Assembly is being convened by France’s Economic, Social and Environmental Council (CESE) itself.
Something of a democratic tradition
In recent years, France has established something of a democratic tradition. Whenever a political question appeared deadlocked, particularly large or particularly sensitive, citizens were selected by lot and asked to take the time to deliberate. One hundred and fifty people discussed climate policy, 184 debated end-of-life issues, and most recently 133 considered school hours. Now three more nationwide citizens’ assemblies are being added within the space of just a few months.
On 12 September, the Citizens’ Assembly on Democracy will begin in Lille. One week later, on 19 September, the 150-member citizens’ assembly “Un commun accord” will meet for the first time in Paris. And on 8 September, France’s Economic, Social and Environmental Council, the CESE, announced a third citizens’ assembly: 150 randomly selected citizens are to deliberate on public finances and consider how France can bring its finances back under control and reduce its budget deficit. The deliberations are expected to last three to four months. Around three million euros have been allocated to the process.
Three citizens’ assemblies, three approaches
The differences are considerable. In Lille, the 50 randomly selected citizens will not deliberate on their own. They will be joined by eleven members of parliament and around 15 to 20 representatives of civil society organisations. Each of the parliamentary groups is to be represented by one person. Over four weekends, from September to December, this unusual gathering will deliberate on how public decisions are made, the balance of powers and political representation. At the beginning of 2027, its proposals are to be presented to the candidates for the presidency.
This is new even for France. In previous national citizens’ assemblies, the randomly selected participants deliberated among themselves; politicians, experts and representatives of organisations could be heard, but did not take part in making the decisions. In Lille, elected and randomly selected participants are now to deliberate together. Sandrine Lévêque, a professor at Sciences Po Lille and a member of the steering group, describes the project as a response to “institutional, political or civic deadlocks”. It is part of a research programme involving eight academic institutions. Four citizens’ assemblies are planned in total.
In Paris, the arrangement is different. “Un commun accord” brings together 150 citizens to deliberate among themselves, following the model of the French Citizens’ Assembly on Climate. Around 200,000 randomly selected telephone numbers were called in July and August in order to assemble a group that reflects France as closely as possible in terms of gender, age, education, occupation, region and the urban-rural divide. Six weekends are planned between September 2026 and February 2027. The first two will focus mainly on information and hearings with experts. Deliberation will follow, and in the end the members will decide which proposals they want to bring into the public debate.
Now, money too
The newest Citizens’ Assembly differs once again from the other two. It is being convened by the CESE itself. For the first time, the council is using its power to initiate a mini public on its own. Its new president, Claire Thoury, has chosen one of the most contentious issues of the approaching presidential election campaign: public debt, expenditure, revenue and the budget deficit.
Thoury explicitly frames the choice of subject as a democratic one. Public finances, she says, are often treated as a matter for experts. Yet they involve fundamental political choices. “If it is incomprehensible to citizens, that means we have a major democratic problem, and that is unacceptable,” she said. She does not expect the participants to come up with a miracle solution. Instead, they are to identify directions, objectives and possible courses of action.
The timing is no coincidence. The CESE has explicitly geared its programme of work for 2026 and 2027 towards the major social questions ahead of the presidential election. Thoury wants to give the council a stronger role in public debate and expand its function as a link between organised civil society, citizens and state institutions.
Jancovici’s wager
One of the main driving forces behind “Un commun accord” is Jean-Marc Jancovici, an engineer, climate expert and chairman of the think tank The Shift Project. Precisely for that reason, he is making a conspicuous effort to limit his own role. His views are not supposed to be what is put to the test. He says he will merely observe the deliberations and give an introductory presentation. “The star is the citizens’ assembly, not me,” is his message.
His reasoning goes to the heart of deliberative participation based on sortition. Science can provide knowledge about reality. But once that knowledge produces conflicts between competing goals, facts alone are no longer enough. Values and differing interests enter the picture – and with them the need for political judgement. Only deliberating together, Jancovici writes, ultimately makes it possible to reach agreement. The citizens’ assembly is therefore not simply intended to collect proposals for stronger climate action, but to make visible the very contradictions that politics often tries to avoid.
That also explains the unusual timing. The outcome is not meant to disappear into a ministry drawer at some later date, but to enter the middle of a presidential election campaign. Jancovici says the aim is for candidates to take up the proposals and for the citizens, after six working weekends, to feel that their work has been “useful”. The citizens’ assembly itself will decide whether to present its results to the presidential candidates.
Democracy debating democracy
The citizens’ assembly in Lille goes a step further. It is not merely deliberating on a policy issue, but on the political system itself. Its guiding question could hardly be broader: What kind of democracy do we want? Among the issues are how public decisions are made, how the powers of the state should be balanced, and what political representation should look like in future.
Behind this lies a diagnosis that has long ceased to concern only democracy researchers in France. Political fragmentation, the absence of stable majorities, the difficult relationship between president, government and parliament, and pronounced distrust of political institutions have pushed the question of how well the Fifth Republic functions to the centre of political debate.
Loïc Blondiaux, a democracy researcher at the Sorbonne, has for years been one of France’s leading experts on randomly selected citizen participation. Public opinion, he says, is generally favourable towards such processes. They could help restore legitimacy to more direct forms of democratic participation and give citizens another way to express their views.
The state steps back – and returns
Until 8 September, the two citizens’ assemblies already announced had one striking feature in common: both were nationwide in scope, but neither had been convened by the government or the president. The Lille citizens’ assembly is being organised by researchers and made possible within the framework of a publicly funded research programme. “Un commun accord” emerged outside state institutions and is also financed through donations from citizens. More than 153,000 people have supported the fundraising campaign until 8 September 2026 – far more than the original target of 10,000. The organisers explicitly see the large number of supporters as evidence that the citizens’ assembly enjoys backing in society.
The Citizens’ Assembly on public finances changes this picture. Here too, the mandate does not come from the president or the government. But with the CESE, a state institution is once again acting as organiser – and this time on its own initiative. That is more than a procedural detail. The CESE is asserting its own ability to choose issues on which randomly selected citizens should be heard.
The CESE is by now no newcomer to such processes. France’s Economic, Social and Environmental Council already organised the Citizens’ Assembly on assisted dying. Claire Thoury knows the instrument particularly well: before becoming the first woman to head the CESE in May 2026, she chaired this mini public.
The memory of the climate assembly
France, in particular, has by now experienced both sides of the instrument. The 2019–2020 Citizens’ Convention for Climate became an international model. Its 150 randomly selected members developed 149 recommendations. A 2025 KNOCA analysis concluded that 20 per cent of the recommendations had been fully implemented and a further 51 per cent implemented in modified form. The political influence of the Citizens’ Assembly was therefore greater than public perceptions often suggest. At the same time, the study shows that the government was selective in what it adopted: recommendations based more on incentives than on binding requirements were taken up more frequently, as were especially detailed proposals.
But the story did not end there. In the years that followed, some political measures linked to recommendations from the citizens’ assembly were relaxed again or politically called into question. Laurence Tubiana, who co-chaired the climate assembly, pointed in 2025, among other things, to the rollback of low-emission zones and uncertainty surrounding support for energy-efficient building renovation. This does not contradict KNOCA’s findings: those findings mainly describe the extent to which recommendations initially entered public policy. Later political majorities can change such decisions again.
France therefore demonstrates both sides of the story: citizens’ assemblies can exert considerable political influence, but their results are not permanently protected from later political decisions. That is precisely why attention around new citizens’ assemblies is increasingly focused not only on selection and deliberation, but also on what happens after the recommendations are handed over. KNOCA’s research also points out that their impact can extend beyond legislation – for example, by placing previously neglected issues on the political agenda in the first place.
Three paths of sortition
Within the space of a few weeks, France is therefore experimenting with three markedly different forms of randomly selected citizen participation. In Lille, elected representatives and randomly selected citizens sit at the same table and discuss how democracy should function in future. In “Un commun accord”, randomly selected citizens deliberate among themselves on social and political trade-offs that the competing candidates will have to confront during the election campaign. At the CESE, another 150 randomly selected citizens will deliberate – this time on one of the fields politicians have particularly liked to treat as a matter for experts: the national budget.
The third Citizens’ Assembly thus sharpens the question that also lies behind the other two. What happens when randomly selected citizens, after months of information and deliberation, reach conclusions different from those of parties, ministries or experts? France’s experience so far shows that the influence of a Citizens’ Assembly can be considerable – but also that the political treatment of its proposals is neither complete nor permanently guaranteed.
An election campaign with another voice
Perhaps that is the real novelty of France in 2026. Citizens’ assemblies are no longer merely convened from above from time to time when the president or government wants to address an especially difficult question. Researchers, civil society groups and now the CESE itself are using sortition on their own initiative – and all three processes point towards the same moment: the 2027 presidential election.
None of these citizens’ assemblies can pass laws or force the implementation of its recommendations. Yet together they could alter an election campaign that would otherwise be shaped mainly by parties, personalities and opinion polls. Citizens are not supposed to be asked only on election day. Before then, they are to spend months deliberating, disagreeing, calculating, listening and making proposals.
And perhaps the Citizens’ Assembly on public finances is the toughest test of all. Talking about democracy is difficult. So is talking about climate and social trade-offs. But when it comes to money, political agreement tends to disappear particularly quickly. If 150 randomly selected people now work their way through revenue, expenditure, debt and proposals for savings, France will find out whether sortition can produce something even where its political system has struggled for years: decisions that add up not only on paper, but that society is also prepared to support.
Note: The image accompanying this article was generated by AI.