jmcd wrote:
The Fifth Republic has obvious problems, and this has also been mentioned for decades: the concentration of power in the president.
That's a feature, but it's not an obvious problem.
In constitutions, there's a difference between something people don't all like, and something that stops the country working. A strong president is not the latter.
This has led to many people down the years, including Mélenchon, to compare the position to that of a monarch.
Well yes - the President, like a monarch, is a head of state. A president is always effectively an elected monarch. Of course, just as there are absolute and constitutional monarchs, there are strong and weak presidents. The French monarch is actually unusually weak for a directly-elected president, btw.
The composition of Fourth Republic governments might have changed often, but is change a bad thing?
Chaos is not change.
How do you think change happens? Not by someone snapping their fingers. It takes work. It takes plans, and revisions, and step-by-step passing of bills in a concerted fashion toward a single end.
That can't happen if the government changes ever couple of months. Without stability, you can't have change - it's like trying to push something while you're standing on ice.
And of course, the chaos doesn't even bring real change in personnel. Frequent government turnover tends to mean that a core of politicians end up in government perpetually (the ones who are essential to any mathematically-viable coalition). They can't get stuff done because their partners are constantly changing, but they can stop things getting done!
(the best example here is the Italian First Republic: government duration was measured in weeks, yet the Christian Democrats remained in power for forty years. It was a great recipe for stagnation and corruption...)
The Fourth Republic certainly put in place many popular measures like Social Security, though admittedly similar measures were put in place in other European countries at about the same time.
It's true that the Fourth Republic was not a total failure - it accomplished some things. But how, when the government kept falling? Because power was increasingly delegated to an elite, unelected bureaucratic caste who were able to continue to progress their own agenda by ignoring the politicians (and from whose ranks the politicians were often drawn). That's not necessarily a good thing!
[also, please note: like a lot of what the republic did manage to do, the big social security changes were all made in the first year of the republic, during tripartisme, an inherently unsustainable condition]
It's also generally felt that any system that collapses in a military coup d'etat has done something wrong.
I don"t see any trend in favour of strong presidential systems being any more able to reform or less conservative.
The more people you have to get to agree on a policy, the harder it is to get it passed. Hence dictators (the strongest presidents!) can get things done on a whim, while people in Somalia during the civil war (a state of total anarchy - the weakest president!) could get very little done at all. The art of the constitution is finding an appropriate balance between power and constraint.
The France Insoumise's proposal for a Sixth Republic is available online and is divided into 15 different sections:
https://laec.fr/chapitre/1/la-6e-republique, only one of which is about the constituent assembly. One of the measures in the second section is to ban from office anyone convicted of corruption. Obviously, you can't necessarily prevent every instance of corruption, but you can prevent the known cases from being allowed back into positions of power.
I'm afraid I can't read French - but even so, most of those points are clearly nothing to do with a sixth republic in any meaningful sense, as they only involve (generally minor) legislative changes, rather than constitutional changes.
Regarding the French President, btw: it's worth noting that, constitutionally, he has very little power at all. The role was created as a ceremonial position not greatly different from that of many parliamentary systems - it was transformed by the personal authority of De Gaulle, and the passing of an ammendment to directly elect the position. Nonetheless, the power the President has is given to him by Parliament and the people, not by the constitution. It's the Prime Minister who, constitutionally, leads the government and the passage of laws, and who makes almost all appointments - and while the President appoints the Prime Minister, he cannot remove him from office, and must appoint him with the consent of Parliament. Constitutionally, the President just deals with the military and the foreign service, and sometimes acts as a check on the power of the PM (he can call new elections, call referendums, refer things to the constitutional court, etc).
The powers of the President in practice come from three things:
- the French people demanded that the Presidency be strengthened by synchronising elections to make it much rarer for Parliament to be able to oppose the President
- the French people then obsessively ensured that they always voted for the same party for both Presidency and Parliament. Even when, as in the most recent case, that meant destroying the existing party system just to give the President more power!
- the French parties then tacitly committed to strengthening the power of the Presidency by acting in a servile manner toward him, making him an unusually powerful party leader. For instance, Prime Ministers will always resign if a President of the same party asks them to. Why? They don't have to. They don't in many other countries - even in the US, which is a full presidential system (as opposed to the 'semi-presidentialism' of France), the President can't just demand that the Congressional leadership resign at his say-so! But in France they do.
This isn't because of constitutional flaws; it's because of the behaviour of politicians. And so it's hard to remedy it through constitutional reform!
I note, though, that Melenchon ran for President, not to be Prime Minister - which rather suggests that his party will continue to be committed to the primacy of the presidency!