Chloé Morin poses a diagnosis that many prefer not to hear: distrust is not a pathology of peoples. It is a signal, sometimes loud and clumsy, that says something true about the way elites have ceased to believe themselves accountable to those they govern. On the other side of the Atlantic, Francis Fukuyama defends a more reassuring thesis: liberal democracies have survived far more severe crises, and their institutional checks and balances resist better than one might think.

These two readings do not exclude each other. They answer different questions. And the tension between them illuminates something essential: why certain democracies absorb the populist shock while others dissolve into it.

The Essentials

  • In France, confidence in political parties has been in continuous deterioration for several years, reaching historic records of distrust in 2025 and 2026, with levels described as “unprecedented” by CEVIPOF.
  • Chloé Morin identifies in her work the central mechanism: an “elites separatism” that precedes and nourishes popular distrust, rather than the reverse.
  • Fukuyama, in Liberalism and Its Discontents (2022), acknowledges the rise of illiberalism but argues that institutional safeguards remain the best available bulwark.
  • The tension between the two analyses points toward a practical question: is correcting elite practices sufficient, or must institutions be refounded to make them structurally less capturable?

Chloé Morin, Sociologist of Ordinary Distrust

Chloé Morin is not a theorist observing the masses from afar. She headed the Opinion department at Ipsos, coordinated research for the Jean-Jaurès Foundation, and published several essays since 2020 whose base materials comprise thousands of hours of qualitative interviews with French citizens who no longer vote, vote poorly, or vote angrily. Her work combines the rigor of quantitative data with an unusual attention to the texture of ordinary language: what people actually say when asked why they no longer have confidence.

What makes her diagnosis useful is precisely that it refuses the comfort of moralizing explanations. She does not speak of manipulated peoples, of irrational protest votes, or of a pathology that education alone could cure. She speaks of a gap in lived experience between governors and governed who no longer inhabit the same social world, no longer fear the same risks, and no longer speak the same language.

Elite Separatism Seen from Below

Morin’s central thesis is uncomfortable for her natural readers. She argues that political decomposition in France does not stem primarily from a pedagogical deficit, nor from a crisis of truth or information. It stems from an earlier sociological phenomenon: political, media, and economic elites have progressively reunited in a common space of mobility, values, and sociability, to the point of no longer perceiving the realities experienced by those they claim to represent.

This separatism is not primarily ideological. It is a matter of life trajectories. French elites are formed in the same grandes écoles, inhabit the same neighborhoods, take the same trips, share the same anxieties. Deindustrialization cost them intellectual debates; it cost the workers of Lorraine or the North entire jobs, entire social classes, entire municipalities. When a minister speaks of “crossing the street to find work,” he is not lying in his world. He is lying in the world of those listening to him.

CEVIPOF has documented this fracture for a decade. In 2024, confidence in political parties in France stood at 20% according to wave 15 of the Barometer of Political Confidence — a figure that reflects not stability but the beginning of continuous deterioration: 16% in 2025, 15% in 2026, levels described as “unprecedented” by CEVIPOF itself. Distrust has been durably high for years, but it is worsening, notably since 2024. Confidence in Parliament does not exceed 25%. Morin adds to these figures a qualitative reading: what the least educated French, those farthest from major cities, express is not so much hatred of institutions as grief. They have stopped expecting. And resentment comes after, not before.

This is where her analysis is most useful: populism, in this reading, is not a cause but a late symptom. It arrives when distrust has exhausted all its polite forms.

Fukuyama or the Robustness of Safeguards

Francis Fukuyama occupies a different space. In Liberalism and Its Discontents, published in 2022, he does not minimize the crisis. He examines it with a clarity that surprises those who reduce him to the naive author of “the end of history.” His argument is more subtle: liberal democracies are imperfect, but their institutional architecture contains mechanisms of resistance that have proven their effectiveness.

His reasoning rests on a comparative observation. Democracies have survived the Great Depression, fascisms, the Cold War, oil shocks, and financial upheavals. Their robustness does not lie in the excellence of their elites or the wisdom of their peoples. It lies in the separation of powers, the independence of the judiciary, freedom of the press, electoral competition. These devices allow for correction of errors without destroying the framework.

Fukuyama also observes that the two current threats to liberalism come from opposite directions: excessive neoliberalism that reduced democracy to technocratic management of markets, and identity progressivism that has weakened the universalist foundations of the liberal project. This double movement has left the field open to populisms, which offer simple coherence where liberalism had become complex and defensive.

His bet remains institutional. The safeguards held in the United States against Trump in 2020-2021. They held in Poland where civil and judicial mobilization slowed the unraveling of the rule of law. They held in South Korea against an attempted martial law in December 2024 — Korean democracy responded within forty-eight hours. These examples are not happenstance: they illustrate that institutions, when carefully built and maintained over decades, resist assaults.

Where the Two Analyses Brush Against Each Other Without Meeting

Morin and Fukuyama do not contradict each other on the facts. They diverge on what matters most for understanding the divergent trajectories of democracies.

For Morin, the decisive variable is cultural and social: an elite that reappropriates the shared experience of its fellow citizens can restore legitimacy to existing institutions. The crisis is therefore reversible, but it requires a work of humility and cultural reconversion that French elites in particular struggle to undertake. Her reading explains why France has accumulated political crises since 2005: each reform attempt from above encounters distrust so deeply entrenched that it fuels the crisis rather than resolving it.

For Fukuyama, the decisive variable is architectural: well-designed institutions correct the drifts of elites of themselves, provided they are preserved. His reading better explains why Denmark or Sweden display levels of institutional confidence that France has not known for decades. These countries do not have better elites. They have institutions that structurally produce accountability.

The tension between the two analyses points to a common diagnosis: France cumulates both problems. Its institutions are relatively unconstrained for elites — the concentration of power in the Fifth Republic executive offers few internal checks — and its elites have developed documented social separatism. This combination explains French exceptionalism in comparative distrust surveys.

What Morin Sees That Fukuyama Does Not Seek

Morin’s specific strength is rendering the phenomenon empirically granular. She does not speak of “distrust” as a monolithic bloc. She segments it. There are those who have stopped voting from exhaustion, those who vote extreme from conviction, those who vote extreme to be heard, and those still seeking, without finding, a narrative that would include them. These segments do not have the same histories, the same demands, the same horizons for recovery.

This granularity changes practical politics. If distrust is a homogeneous and unrecoverable bloc, one can content oneself with waiting for institutions to hold. If it is segmented, part of the defeated electorate is recoverable through different political practices, without complete institutional overhaul. Morin leans toward this second reading, and her data support it: spikes in participation — the left primary in 2011, certain local elections, the first seasons of Swiss referendums that French observe with curiosity — show that abstention is not irreversible.

She also raises a question that Fukuyama does not pose: what happens when institutional mechanisms function but their social legitimacy collapses? A constitutional court can be impeccably independent and technically robust; if citizens perceive it as an instrument of a caste, its legitimacy empties before its formal authority gives way. Fukuyama’s institutional robustness presupposes a floor of social confidence that Morin shows approaching dangerously.

What Fukuyama Preserves That Morin Underestimates

Morin’s blind spot is symmetrical. For looking at distrust from below, she risks underestimating the structural solidity of certain devices. French democracy has absorbed considerable shocks without formal rupture: the rise of the National Front since the 1980s, May 1968, the yellow vests crisis in 2018-2019, and chaotic successions of governments since 2022. This resistance is not anecdotal.

Fukuyama brings something useful here: the fact that institutions hold even when they are disliked says something about their intrinsic robustness. The Fifth Republic is often criticized for its concentration of power, but that same concentration has allowed it to act quickly in crises. The Court of Auditors continues to function. The Council of State retains real independence. The press, despite its economic fragilities, remains pluralistic.

His most solid argument remains comparative. Countries that descended into illiberalism — Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, Erdoğan’s Turkey, progressively Russia — all shared a similar sequence: first the deliberate weakening of independent institutions, then the capture of justice and media, then electoral lockdown. Where these sequences were interrupted — in Poland in 2023, in South Korea in 2024 — it was because sufficiently solid institutions resisted long enough for civic mobilization to coordinate. Institutional solidity does not prevent crisis; it gives time to resolve it. This reading note on Power and Progress by Acemoglu and Johnson, already published in the journal, documents the same mechanism for technology: the benefits of transformation do not distribute automatically, one needs institutions solid enough to impose sharing.

The Long Arc: A Matter of Thresholds

The prospective dimension of this debate is not rhetorical. Distrust measured in France traces a worrying curve in continuous deterioration, as CEVIPOF data on recent years show. What would distinguish a lasting tipping point from a cyclical plateau is less the absolute level of distrust than its generational distribution.

Available data — notably CEVIPOF annual surveys and European Values Studies — show that 18-34 year-olds display levels of institutional confidence lower than their elders of the same age measured ten years earlier. This is the most serious signal: if distrust transmits as a disposition formed early and difficult to undo, we enter a long-term dynamic that exceeds the short-term capacity for correction of either institutions or elites.

Fukuyama and Morin converge here, implicitly. Institutional resilience has a temporal horizon. Solid institutions can absorb one generation of distrust; they resist less well two successive generations of growing alienation. And the strengthening of the link between elites and ordinary citizens also has a horizon: credible signals of reconversion are needed before the youngest cohorts permanently fix their political preferences outside the liberal system.

The stakes of the coming decade are therefore not choosing between reform of practices and defense of institutions. Both are necessary at the same time. Morin provides the map of the social problem; Fukuyama provides the argument for not throwing out the framework along with its defects. What neither says clearly — and what the combination of their work allows one to glimpse — is that the determining factor will be speed. Democracies that recover are those that correct before distrust becomes transmission. Those that get bogged down are those that wait until the crisis is visible enough to act.

Why Read Both

The work of Chloé Morin speaks primarily to those who make or think about French politics: it offers a grammar of ordinary distrust that no aggregate poll can replace. The granularity of her opinion analyses allows distinguishing what is recoverable from what is not, and avoiding two symmetrical errors — the condescension that treats distrust as a misunderstanding, and the catastrophism that treats it as a fatality.

Liberalism and Its Discontents by Fukuyama speaks to those seeking the substantive argument for defending the liberal framework against its adversaries on both sides. Short, dense, without concessions to flattery, the book is a useful clarification of what liberalism actually is — a procedural device for limiting power, not an ideology of markets or meritocracy — and the conditions for its survival.

Read together, they answer the same question through two different entries. Why do liberal democracies hold, or collapse? Morin answers: because elites do or do not inhabit the same world as their fellow citizens. Fukuyama answers: because institutions were or were not built to resist failing elites. Both are right. And the articulation between their answers is exactly where the political future of European democracies is at stake.

Chloé Morin Essays 2020-2026, notably Le Peuple vraiment? and contributions to the Jean-Jaurès Foundation Jean-Jaurès Foundation / Ipsos

Francis Fukuyama Liberalism and Its Discontents Profile Books, 2022 180 pages

Sources

  1. Chloé Morin — interview Political decomposition is not finished
  2. Barometer of Political Confidence — CEVIPOF, Sciences Po Paris (annual series 2013-2024)
  3. Francis Fukuyama, Liberalism and Its Discontents, Profile Books, 2022
  4. European Values Study — comparative surveys on institutional confidence in Europe
  5. CEVIPOF Barometer of Political Confidence – Wave 17 (2026)
  6. CEVIPOF Infographic wave 17 – Historical series political parties
  7. Fukuyama – Liberalism and Its Discontents (2022)
  8. Wikipedia – Chloé Morin (bibliography and career)
  9. Gallimard – Populism to the Rescue of Democracy? (Morin, 2021)
  10. Wikipedia – South Korean martial law of 2024
  11. ECHR – Polish Cases Rule of Law