Politics & Power Quote by Jacques Delors

Delors is diagnosing a democracy that has lost its shock absorbers. “Intermediary groups” sounds bloodless, but he’s pointing to the thick, unglamorous infrastructure that once translated private grievances into public priorities: unions, churches, professional associations, local parties, civic clubs. Without them, the citizen meets the state alone, as a data point. Politics becomes a direct-feed system where leaders chase the newest spike in sentiment, mistaking immediacy for legitimacy.

The phrase “unduly guided” is doing quiet work. Delors isn’t condemning public opinion; he’s warning about a lopsided relationship where polls don’t measure a considered “public will” so much as they manufacture a mandate for reactive governance. Opinion surveys flatten complexity into a number, rewarding the loud, the anxious, the newly angry. Intermediary bodies, at their best, slow time down: they bargain, deliberate, build coalitions, and force leaders to negotiate with organized interests rather than today’s headline mood.

Context matters: Delors came of age in postwar Europe and helped shape the EU’s technocratic, consensus-driven project. He watched mass parties erode, union density fall, and media markets shift toward faster, more personalized politics. In that landscape, polling offers a seductive substitute for social rooting: cheap feedback in place of durable representation. The subtext is also a defense of pluralism against both populist shortcuts and managerial isolation. If leaders govern by poll, the state doesn’t become more democratic; it becomes more twitchy, more theatrical, and easier to capture by whoever can move the numbers.