EDITO – The Fifth Republic is considered by many to be a “presidential regime”, some going so far as to qualify it as “monarchical” or “Jupiterian”. In fact, it has become a semi-presidential regime since the 1962 referendum, a sort of hybrid regime simultaneously presenting characteristics specific to the presidential regime and the parliamentary regime. An originality of the 1958 Constitution which explains the temporary erasure of the presidential office in favor of the Prime Minister in the so-called periods of cohabitation.
According to Article 8 of the Constitution, the Prime Minister is appointed by the President of the Republic, a power specific to the latter, since he does not need the approval of another member of the government for this appointment. This choice of the Prime Minister is, on the other hand, not so free as that.
If the powers of the President of the Republic are numerous and strong, the cohabitations of 1986-88 and 1998-2002 have shown that he needs a majority won over to his cause in the National Assembly in order to be able to implement his program. The President of the Republic is therefore bound by this: concretely, if he wants the appointed Prime Minister to be capable of governing – since under Article 20 of the Constitution, he is the one who directs the action of the government – he must be chosen from among the parliamentary majority. The choice of the president is therefore constrained by the results of the legislative elections. Not to take into account the results of this ballot and the resulting parliamentary majority would be, for the president, to risk seeing his bills blocked or seeing the National Assembly vote a motion of censure against the government.
There are then two scenarios: if the president obtains a majority in the Assembly, he is relatively free in his choice. On the other hand, if he is not supported by the majority, he is then forced to choose someone from the opposition parliamentary majority, which gives de facto cohabitation.
The state of health emergency of the past two years has led to a succession of decisions, often deemed “hasty” or even “anti-democratic”, which demonstrates that the parliamentary majority in the National Assembly is a keystone of executive power. .
If the President of the Republic finds himself without a parliamentary majority, he finds himself forced to share executive power with a Prime Minister who will direct the action of the government according to the will of a coalition of deputies, and not just the will inspired by the President of the Republic, hence the term “cohabitation” and hence the importance of legislative elections, the deputies being appointed by this means.
The legislative elections to be held this weekend are all the more important in that they will perhaps make it impossible to form a coalition of deputies in sufficient numbers to validate the appointment of a Prime Minister, thus leaving the risk that the France is unable to have a government capable of managing it. A configuration that Belgium has experienced on several occasions, with its share of consequences.
It is moreover because the specificity of the legal system of the Fourth Republic, framed by the Constitution of October 29, 1946, led to this impasse, that General de Gaulle revised the Constitution, which was approved massively (70% of yes) during the referendum of September 1958.
In 2022, although the current system may favor the major political parties to the extreme during the legislative elections, it is nonetheless possible that because of the French people’s fed up with political parties – as evidenced by the initiative of Reciproc.org where nearly a hundred candidates signed the “charter of the elected” – the presence of a handful of “independent” deputies came to reshuffle the cards and make it impossible to form a parliamentary majority or a sufficiently large coalition of deputies.
The current parameters seem to want to go in this direction, it will perhaps be enough that only one candidate “outside the system” is elected deputy, so that this impossibility intervenes.
Let me explain.
Firstly, if we refer to the results of the first round of this year’s presidential election, none of the three major current political parties, ENSEMBLE (the Republic on the move, the Modem, the Radical Party, etc.), the NUPES (New Union popular ecological and social), and the so-called “extreme right” parties (Rassemblement National, Reconquête, Debout la France, les Patriotes), does not seem able to obtain on its own the absolute majority required in the National Assembly to validate the appointment of the Prime Minister of his choice.
The trend of the latest polls (Ifop-Fiducial) shows the rise of NUPES to 26% of voting intentions, ahead of ENSEMBLE (the presidential majority) at 25%, which could therefore find itself without the precious majority of 289 deputies out of the 577 elected.
Given that it is highly unlikely that two of these three coalitions will combine to acquire this absolute majority, the impossibility of having a Prime Minister capable of governing is more than ever possible after the legislative elections of this year.
Secondly, we must add to this that the abstainers during the presidential election seem finally decided to vote this Sunday for candidates outside the three major political parties. If they vote, they will do so for those who are called “citizen candidates”: citizens who present themselves precisely as opponents of the three major political coalitions.
And these “citizen candidates”, whom certain “specialists” of television sets have allowed themselves to tax as “wacky”, there are almost in all the constituencies. Victory in many other constituencies of several of them is therefore not a crying utopia, far from it.
Will the Fifth Republic fall back into a configuration similar to that of the pre-58 years? Start of response this Sunday.