Are political parties dead ?

The dwindling number of its members combined to the emerging figures of personalities
such as Donald Trump or Emmanuel Macron tends to fragilize political parties in western
democracies. Such a statement must however be nuanced.

It is obvious that political parties more and more fail to provide both efficient leaders to
govern and members to preach. Primary elections organized in France for instance to
recover both their finances and legitimacy have led to Francois Fillon’s and Benoît Amon’s
defeat in 2017 and is more than likely to cause that of Valerie Pécresse and Yannick Jedo’s
on April 10th.
This failure is to be compared with the success of lonely personalities such as Donald
Trump or Emmanuel Macron who reached power without their support. Facing directly
electors sounds more efficient to gain popularity and voters.

Such a situation is however unobserved in countries where parliamentary elections tend

to play a higher role like in Great Britain or Germany. In such democracies, the party still
plays a key role to produce strong personalities to govern the country.
Besides, the political parties’s crises seems to take part to a wider phenomenon of a
major disaffection for citizens to voting and belonging to corporations such as Unions. In
other words, individualism as a social value seems more to be blamed than political
parties themselves. The end of ideologies, widely observed after the end of Cold War,
seems to accelerate the tendency.

If political parties tend to fragilize themselves by failing to removal their practices, they
tend to be trapped by an individualist society that less and less tolerates collective
discipline and beliefs.