Time.news – The day after the legislative elections of June 12 and 19, 2022, the government let out a strange ditty that could only deceive those who wanted to be. According to our rulers, it was a wonderful opportunity to have a simply relative majority in the National Assembly; finally, we were going to be able to run the country differently, by the permanent search for compromise.
It will not have taken six months for the illusions to vanish and for reality to impose itself on everyone. The exercise of power – even in ordinary times, and we are certainly not there! – supposes that the government can rely on an absolute majority of deputies to pass laws.
For my part, I had seen in this Assembly without a real majority “a taste of proportional representation” which is announced to us at regular intervals, and the skit which was played last week on the forum moreover resembles be mistaken for the poisons and delights of the Fourth Republic, where this voting system never made it possible to achieve a stable and coherent majority of government, which explains the 24 successive governments between 1946 and 1958.
It is because there is no absolute majority of deputies to support Mr. Macron and his government that Nicolas Sarkozy came out of silence, and seized the opportunity of an interview with the “Journal du dimanche” to call his successor to “seek to make an agreement with all those of goodwill ready to form a majority in the best interests of the country”. When the former head of state depicts “Macron in the position of a hunter who does not have an infinite resource of ammunition”because in 2008 he initiated a review of our institutions limiting recourse to Article 49.3, how can we fail to point out that it was very precisely to put an end to the vagaries of the party system that the constituents of 1958 (at the number of which included several former presidents of the Council of the Fourth Republic) had provided for this provision which was part of a “rationalized parliamentarianism”?
It is this same precariousness of power before Parliament that led Emmanuel Macron to come out, a few days after the declarations of his predecessor at the JDD, in favor of a parliamentary “alliance” with Les Républicains and the centrists of the group Libertés, Independents, Overseas and Territories. “I think, explained the President of the Republic on France 2, that with these parliamentarians, who today are not in the majority, the government and the majority in the Assembly have an interest in working”.
And it is always for the same reason that Jean-François Copé drove the point home without frills in an interview published in “Le Figaro” on October 28. “Without an absolute majority”the president of the Republic “can’t do anything (…). So there is no other choice than a government agreement with LR”. The mayor of Meaux goes very far in advocating “a summit meeting to put everything on the table”and setting the conditions of the “alliance” : “It’s up to Mr. Macron to make concessions for an authentic turn to the right and a takeover of the country. The LRs – who have become the second force of the majority – will have to demand from the president a radical change on the reforms and take responsibility key ministries, even the first of them”. Defeated in the presidential election and the legislative elections, the LR party would therefore occupy the Hôtel Matignon. It would be a return to the pivotal groups that make and unmake governments.
It is quite clear that these political combinations move us away each day a little more from the practice and the spirit of the Fifth Republic. Especially when Mr. Copé puts forward an ultimate and curious scenario: “Governing until 2025-2026 (…) and then regaining independence to prepare for the presidential election of 2027”. In other words, we first share the power, then everyone returns “cook your little soup, on a slow fire, in your little corner”. It is unlikely that such a conception of political life is likely to bring citizens back to the polls.
Because the June 2022 legislative election did not yield a real majority, the political forces are trying to organize themselves several months after the elections. Never, since 1958, had such a situation arisen. To speak like Mr. Copé, there is, however, an “other choice”, the one that many French people think of who consider that this political situation will not last five years. This choice is the one organized by the 1958 Constitution by returning to the voters, in favor of a dissolution of the National Assembly or a referendum. In one case as in the other, the initiative belongs to the President of the Republic, and the arbitration of the French people, who is the only sovereign, would be imposed on him.
Under the Fifth Republic, given the importance of the prerogatives attributed to him by the Constitution, the President of the Republic must indeed have the deep support of the country. For this reason, its appeal to the French people, by way of dissolution or referendum, takes on the significance of a question of confidence. In the event of a negative response from the people, the consequence was clearly drawn by René Capitant, General de Gaulle’s last Minister of Justice, in his doctorate course in constitutional law given after the failed referendum of April 27, 1969: “Repeating the famous ultimatum issued by the triumphant electoral majority the day after May 16 to MacMahon’s address “submit or resign”, one could say that the characteristic of our regime is that the president, in the event of disavowal , must resign and that, in short, he has no right to submit”.
This was how the Fifth Republic functioned at the time of its founder. Opposing the Fourth Republic, in a speech delivered in Bayonne on September 7, 1947, General de Gaulle had called for “a regime in which the nation has to decide for itself if a crisis were to go beyond the normal play of powers”. This is exactly what the 1958 Constitution allows. Resorting to the country should be preferred to the arrangements of previous Republics.