When Charles de Gaulle created France’s Fifth Republic in 1958, the main priority was to establish a political system that ensured total stability.
As if to prove the point, de Gaulle was the first of only eight presidents in the 67 years since ― and the new structure gave him powers on a par with those of a monarch.
But the cracks are beginning to show. Now, with a beleaguered Emmanuel Macron overseeing the resignation of a prime minister after just 26 days in office, France looks anything but stable. De Gaulle’s creation is being tested to the breaking point.
Looking at the dumpster fire of French politics over the past few months, it’s tempting to pile most of the blame at the feet of President Macron. After all, it was his decision to dissolve the National Assembly and call parliamentary elections last year, triggering the crisis that has so far claimed five prime ministers, and could well claim a sixth before the year is out.
But to blame Macron alone is to miss the larger problem — that France’s Fifth Republic is congenitally incapable of accommodating compromise and power-sharing.
Designed as an antidote to the hyper-fractious Fourth Republic, which cycled through 21 different administrations in 12 years, de Gaulle’s system was optimized to produce just one outcome: a hyper-powerful president backed by an absolute majority in parliament.
Every institutional gear is tuned toward this end, including a two-round presidential election that forces voters to rally around the most consensual choice, and the fact that legislative elections take place immediately after the presidential vote.
The Fifth Republic works beautifully as long as the president’s party holds a clear majority in parliament. The government then becomes a sort of glorified consultative body serving the parliament’s agenda.
No compromise
But in any other configuration, it’s a mess. If parliament is dissolved and an opposition party takes power, the result is a cohabitation — synonymous with paralysis.
In the event of a hung parliament — which is what France got after the June 2024 election — it’s even worse. Parties have no institutional interest or cultural inclination toward compromise. Any outward sign of cooperation is viewed with suspicion. Power is so skewed toward the president that even if the parties did cooperate, it would be nearly impossible to have any real influence.
Instead, party leaders coldly calculate that their best interest is to stay outside government and do whatever they can to precipitate the next presidential election — even if that means toppling one PM after another.
Which is what is happening now.
“In reality, everyone is only thinking about the presidential election,” said Gilles Gressani, director of Le Grand Continent, a French journal, and president of the Groupe d’études géopolitiques think tank. “In France almost all the mid-high-level political actors, but also economic actors, are really thinking about what they could do to become president of the French republic.”
The results of this system, and its glaring blind spots, have been on display for the past 17 months.
One after another, five prime ministers attempted, with varying levels of skill and sincerity, to strike a budget agreement with the largest mainstream parties in parliament. And one after another, each concluded it was a fool’s errand and walked away from the job ever more hastily ― in less than a month, in the case of current PM Sébastien Lecornu.
Lecornu, who resigned as prime minister last Monday only to be re-appointed on Friday evening, recognized that the presidential ambitions of heavyweight politicians were interfering with the political stability of the country.
As a result, he said, his future ministers will have to “commit to disconnect from presidential ambitions for 2027.”
The German model
This chaos, which has assumed a momentum of its own and shows no sign of abating, has some French politicians gazing wistfully at parliamentary systems where coalition deals are part of the political DNA.
Standing next to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in August, Macron himself implored lawmakers in his own country’s parliament to be a bit more like their German counterparts, who had just hammered out one of their ironclad Koalitionsvertrag ― a coalition deal between the center right and center left.
“On the other side of the Rhine, it appears that a conservative party and a socialist party are managing to work together,” the French president said. “That happens not so far from us, and it works, so I think it’s possible.”
Even Italy, which has so often been a political basket case, now looks more solid than France. That’s in large part due to the experience of its parties in striking coalition agreements such as that under Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, which has held up for nearly three years, according to Marc Lazar, a professor at Sciences Po university in Paris.
“This [tradition of compromise] could be an Italian lesson for the French parties that don’t have it,” he said.
Sadly for Macron, though, there’s little sign that France’s party leaders are on the brink of a compromise epiphany.
Indeed, no sooner had Lecornu announced last week that he was stepping down than far-right leader Marine Le Pen threatened to topple the country’s next prime minister — whoever that may be.
Sixth republic?
In a country obsessed with politics, observers aren’t immune to the problems of the Fifth Republic. Analysts have for years bemoaned the fact that the system reduces parliament to a powerless claque, fomenting a burn-it-all-down mentality among opposition parties. They point out that at a time when insurgent political forces are proving ever more successful at challenging incumbents, it might make sense to grant them at least some measure of influence via, for instance, proportional representation in government.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a far-left firebrand and repeat presidential contender, based his 2022 campaign partly on the idea that France must transition to a “Sixth Republic.” Establishment party leaders were quick to dismiss that idea, arguing it would primarily serve his interests.
But as France stares into the abyss, it may be time to start thinking outside the box. Maybe de Gaulle’s creation has outlived its time.
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