-OpEd-
PARIS — To allow a stable French government to be put in place and to prevent the far-right from winning the next presidential election (in 2027) with vengeful rage, the parties elected to the National Assembly must form a stable coalition based on a negotiated program. Judging by the initial statements of political leaders, this prospect seems rather distant.
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The question is why the French seem incapable of this, contrary to many of their neighbors. In Germany, for example, long negotiations in the weeks following the elections result in “coalition contracts” that are anything but lukewarm, as each party promotes what it holds most dear. In the last grand coalition, the Greens obtained the legalization of cannabis, the Socialists increased the minimum wage, and the Liberals maintained budgetary orthodoxy.
The French system
Yet the French are perfectly capable of this. They did so continuously for nearly three-quarters of a century, from 1870 to 1939, under a Third Republic, in which historian Jean Garrigues reminds us was not so impotent; it adopted the major laws that still underpin France’s liberal society, weathered a world war without resorting to dictatorship, produced outstanding orator, and allowed strong political alternations.
Today, French members of in the European Parliament are formidable at the game of conditional support, intersecting interests and quid pro quo.
No one is interested in governing. Everyone wants to preside.
So let’s stop fantasizing about eternal cultural identities. It is all a matter of institutions. In this case, parliamentary democracy creates an system of incentives that favor compromise. Yet that is not the case with France’s presidential regime.
It was obvious Sunday night that no one is interested in governing. Everyone wants to preside. The magnet of political life remains the presidential election, around which all strategies are defined, establishing a binary relationship to power: deference or rebellion; submissive participation or furious opposition.
De Gaulle’s intentions
That was General Charles de Gaulle’s goal when he decided in 1962 on the much-criticized referendum instituting the direct election of the president. It was necessary to give the president indisputable legitimacy, to allow him to embody national sovereignty beyond partisan quarrels.
De Gaulle sought less, according to his statements at the time, to strengthen his own power than to ensure his successors would have the anointment that history would not have given them.
He built the Fifth Republic against the very principle of parliamentary debate, which he saw, as he amusingly writes in his Memoirs, as an “ancient French propensity to disperse into verbose tendencies and to enjoy political games as one does circus fights or greasy pole contests.”
How can we blame Mélenchon, Macron, Le Pen and others for doing exactly what de Gaulle expected of them by refusing any accommodation, arrangement, or discussion?
The last president
This presidential election epitomizes a Caesar-like power, endlessly replaying the missed encounter between “a man and a people.” It creates a verticality that permeates other spheres of society, including schools, businesses and local politics.
It is no coincidence that, in Italy, the far-right Prime Minister had the Senate adopt last month what Giorgia Meloni calls the “mother of all reforms”: election of the President of the Council by direct universal suffrage, coupled with a majority rule that would give unprecedented power to the head of the executive.
The mother of all reforms in France would be to abolish this presidential election
Conversely, to allow the emergence of those parliamentary coalitions that France so desperately needs, to more broadly rediscover the democratic virtues of deliberation, the mother of all reforms in France would be to abolish this presidential election that drives French voters mad. This is an initiative that precisely remains the prerogative of the President of the Republic.
The president could trigger a referendum opposite to that of 1962 to dissolve his function, which he can no longer lay claim to anyway.
Without needing to end the Fifth Republic, real power would return to a prime minister chosen from the interplay of parliamentary forces. And a president elected by indirect suffrage could finally fulfill the role constitutionally assigned to him: guaranteeing the balance of institutions. Thus, Macron could console himself by becoming the last president.
