Conflicts of interest: the new frontier of democracy.

Summary This report is the result of work begun in 2014 and starts from a simple observation. Populist mistrust. This defiance, which has deleterious effects on our democracy, is fueled by real dysfunctions that should not be denied. An inadequate treatment, hence the title of this report. Conflicts of interest can be summarily defined as situations in which a person charged with defending an interest (particular interest or general interest) is in a position, or perhaps suspected of being in a position, to abuse his or her position in order to defend another interest. Conflicts of interest are inherent to life in society: they exist in all economic and social fields and at all hierarchical levels. In this report, we are particularly interested in those that weaken our democracy and trust in our institutions. Our guiding principle is that the responses to be provided must be all the more demanding as individuals are in a position of responsibility towards the community and as the social "costs" of unaddressed conflicts of interest are heavy, particularly in terms of delegitimizing democratic institutions. Our proposals aim to make a contribution to the refoundation of democratic life. We develop our analyses in three fields that have been chosen because of their symbolic, economic importance and/or their impact on the lives of citizens. These are public life in the broad sense, banking and health. These sectors are very likely to generate conflicts of interest, a situation that is reinforced by the fact that the decision-makers in these sectors often have professional trajectories that are synchronously or diachronically part of both the public and private spheres. This structural approach to conflicts of interest does not deny the complexity of the situations, nor the necessary interweaving of the public and private spheres, and the solutions we propose are therefore not dual or Manichean. On the contrary, we envisage a gradation that goes from the incompatibility - or pure and simple prohibition - of a potentially conflicting dual position, leading to the elimination of the conflict of interest, to much more refined regulation mechanisms. The modulation of our proposals takes as a criterion the gravity of the risk to be averted.