Is It Time For a Sixth Republic?

There is a whiff of fin de régime hovering over France these days. The usual excitement of a presidential election campaign has given way to boredom and contempt. Nearly 60% of the French say they have little interest in the contest, and pollsters are predicting possibly the lowest voter turnout in the 44-year history of the Fifth Republic.

The May 5 runoff between the two probable finalists, Gaullist President Jacques Chirac and Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, is likely to be decided by the narrowest of margins. As political analyst Pascal Perrineau puts it: “France’s love affair with presidential elections is over.” But the worst may be yet to come. The new President’s grip on power will depend entirely on the outcome of the June parliamentary elections. If his political camp wins a majority, he will have a solid mandate to govern. But if the opposing forces gain a majority, France could face an institutional crisis that could spell the end of the Fifth Republic. Here’s why: the current constitution, tailor-made for Charles de Gaulle in 1958, is based on a strong, popularly elected President. As long as he is backed by a legislative majority, the President remains clearly in charge and the Prime Minister serves at his pleasure. That is how things worked until 1986, when the right swept mid-term legislative elections and confronted Socialist President François Mitterrand with a so-called cohabitation — a bizarre two-headed arrangement whereby a President of one party shared power with a Prime Minister from an opposing party. Contrary to many predictions, cohabitation did not destroy the republic.

It was awkward and sometimes embarrassing — France became the only major country in the world to send two chief executives to international summits — but the system more or less worked. Some French voters even came to see it as a healthy form of checks-and-balances that prevented any one camp from wielding too much power. The experiment has been repeated twice more, from 1993 to 1995, and from 1997 to the present. But the politicians, and the bulk of public opinion, now view cohabitation as an unstable, paralyzing arrangement. “The French don’t really like cohabitation,” says Guy Carcassonne, a constitutional expert. “They have never consciously chosen it.” In an attempt to make it less likely in the future, a bipartisan reform in 2000 reduced the presidential term from seven to five years, the same as the National Assembly, and synchronized the voting dates. The theory was that voters would not be so perverse as to elect a new President and, one month later, hand a parliamentary majority to his opponents. But nothing guarantees that won’t happen.

Then things could get dangerous. Unlike previous cohabitations, in which a sitting President was sanctioned by a mid-term vote, a split vote this time would represent a conscious choice in favor of divided government. Both the President and the Parliament could claim equal legitimacy. The President could dissolve the assembly and call new elections. But if his forces lost again, he would face strong pressure to resign. The result could be institutional gridlock. “If unity of power is not quickly restored,” says constitutionalist Olivier Duhamel, “it could be the end of the Fifth Republic.”

What then? There has been talk for years of changing France’s anomalous two-headed system. That debate has intensified during the latest five-year cohabitation marked by bitter skirmishes between Jospin and Chirac. Some observers call for an American-style presidential system. Others, including a pressure group called the Convention for the Sixth Republic, want to eliminate the presidency and embrace a European-style parliamentary system. Such talk may be premature. French voters could well make coherent choices in the upcoming contests, rendering the idea of constitutional change less urgent. But a major crisis over power sharing seems inevitable. And when it comes, France will have little choice but to return to the drawing board and reinvent its fundamental law. With 15 constitutions since 1791, few countries in the world can boast so much experience in that domain.