As for democracy, whose main tenet is equal political rights, the ENR, which has never had any taste for despotism or dictatorship, and even less for totalitarianism, has always considered it, if not the best possible regime, at least the one that best meets the requirements of our times. But we must first understand its exact meaning. Democracy is the regime in which sovereignty resides in the people. But in order to be truly sovereign, the people must be able to express itself freely, and those whom it designates as its representatives must act in accordance with its wishes. That is why true democracy is participatory democracy, i.e. a democracy which allows people to exercise their sovereignty as often as possible and not just during the elections. In this sense, universal suffrage is only a technical means to assess the degree of the agreement or the consent between the government and the governed. As understood by the ancient Greeks, democracy, in the final analysis, is a system that allows all of its citizens to participate actively in public affairs. This means that liberty in democracy is defined as an opportunity to participate in activities that are deployed in the public sphere, and certainly not as liberty to become oblivious of the public sphere, or to withdraw oneself into the private sphere. A purely representative democracy is, at best, an imperfect democracy. Political power must be exercised at all levels, and not only at the top. This is only feasible by means of implementing the principle of subsidiarity, which means that the people make as many decisions as possible on issues of concern, and relegate to a higher level of decision-making only matters that concern larger communities. In an age when political representatives are more and more cut off from the people, and where power of the appointed and the co-opted prevails over those who were elected, and where a politician is stripped off his decision-making on behalf of some “governance” whose only goal is to mold the government of the people along the blueprints of business management or corporate managements, then the priority must be to resuscitate participatory democracy – a grass-roots democracy, a direct democracy, as well as to revive the active public sphere which alone is capable of upholding the social bond and guaranteeing the exercise of common values.