A Wrench in the Works: France and its Increasingly Frustrated Power Dynamic

The French Fifth Republic is widely known for having a strong, directly elected President and a somewhat weak Parliament relative to the executive branch. The 1958 Constitution granted the government a wide range of legal tools to protect itself. Since 1962, the executive branch has mostly enjoyed a strong parliamentary majority in the National Assembly, which rendered these tools seldom necessary. Only once in this period has the government lacked an absolute majority, and only by a short margin: from 1988 to 1993, when the Socialist Party controlled 47% of the seats.

However, the 2022 legislative election produced the most divided legislature in the history of the Fifth Republic—a short-lived record, as it would be surpassed in the 2024 election. From 2022 to 2024, France has had a minority government, with a three-party coalition comprising 43% of the Members of the National Assembly (MNAs)—the smallest parliamentary support for the Cabinet in the lower chamber in more than 60 years. This unprecedented situation has generated much tension, with an increasing number of bills being passed or rejected against the government’s wishes.

This situation is not the result of one specific election. Rather, it is the culmination of recent incremental evolutions in the executive–legislative power dynamics, which is rooted in constitutional reforms, the erosion of in-party cohesion, and a rapid party-system fragmentation. Moreover, it is not without consequences for the relationship between the executive and the legislative branches. We argue that if all of those changes allowed Parliament to regain some influence and centrality in the political game, then the political culture has failed to adapt at the same time and still tends to rely on coercion rather than negotiations, resulting in ever-escalating tensions that have yet to be resolved.

What are the factors that led to this situation? The system underwent a major change in dynamics when, in 2000–2001, a constitutional and electoral law reform shortened the presidential term from seven years to align with the five-year mandate of MNAs and placed legislative elections a few weeks after the presidential election, effectively synchronizing previously asynchronous elections. The shift was designed to ever-so-slightly presidentialize the system and to increase the likelihood that the President and the parliamentary majority would be from the same party. However, this also framed the President no longer as a reasonably independent head of state but instead as the political leader of the parliamentary majority. Suddenly much more at the forefront of public scrutiny, personally tied to any political decisions, the President was exposed to a faster decline of his political capital.

This greater exposure of the President appeared to go hand in hand with growing in-party difficulties. The voting cohesion of successive parliamentary majorities steadily declined from 2002 to 2017, as divisions within governing parties became apparent and the popularity rate of the successive presidents kept decreasing (Lecomte and Rozenberg 2021). During their last terms in power, both Conservatives (2007–2012) and Socialists (2012–2017) experienced the consolidation of internal factions at odds with the successive governments’ methods and increasing difficulties in enforcing party discipline and overcoming ideological disagreements. Notably, President François Hollande’s term was marked by strong contestations within his own majority against his policies, which some of his own MNAs accused him of diverging radically from the party’s platform and political goals.

These intraparty difficulties arguably led to a spectacular fragmentation of the French party system (Clift and McDaniel 2017). Indeed, for a long time, French political life was dominated by two poles: one on the left around the Socialist Party; the other on the right around the Gaullists and the centrists—most of whom merged into the same Conservative Party in 2002. This bipolarization was challenged in presidential elections by the rise of the far right, which reached a runoff for the first time in 2002, and the creation of the independent centrist party MoDem in 2007. Nevertheless, neither of these forces managed to carve out a significant space to occupy in the French Parliament in the 2000s and early 2010s.

The presidential election of 2017 was a turning point: both historical main parties collapsed in the first round over their own internal divisions. The independent centrist Emmanuel Macron was elected in the second round against the far-right candidate. Macron’s party was a new creation, founded to support his presidential endeavor by bringing together personalities from the center right and the center left, and quickly encountered internal coherence issues, which led to an unprecedented number of floor crossing and party splits in the National Assembly in a couple of years. On the left, the decrease in the Socialist Party’s electoral share led to a rebalancing of left-wing voters among La France Insoumise’s radical left, the Green Party, the Communist Party, and the remnants of the Socialist Party. On the right, the conservative party became trapped between an increasingly powerful far right and the several center-right parties around Emmanuel Macron.

This rapid fragmentation of the party system culminated in the 2022 legislative election, in which none of the parties, even those considered as potential coalition “blocs” (left, center right, and far right), could hold a majority despite the majority voting system. Macron’s three-party coalition won 43% of the seats, and the four parties of the left—united in the New Ecological and Social People’s Union—won 26% of the seats. The far-right National Rally won about 15% and the conservative Republicans almost 11%; the remaining seats were won by an unusually high number of independent MNAs. The National Assembly then counted 10 parliamentary party groups—a record high—and the effective number of parliamentary parties (according to Laasko and Taagepera’s 1979 formula) has increased from consistently less than three between 2002 and 2017 to more than six by 2022.

On paper, the situation should have been good for parliamentary deliberation. The National Assembly hosted a wide range of diverse parties, none of them strong enough to overpower the others, while the country was led by minority governments—by definition, these are governments that need to find support outside of their own parties to pass bills. Because there were so many oppositions, the oversight function likely was to be fulfilled more thoroughly. This was expected to strengthen Parliament and give it newfound centrality in an institutional system that routinely has disregarded it for decades.

However, the French Fifth Republic is not a consensus democracy. It has no tradition of building majorities through deliberation and compromises. Quite the contrary: the high degree of personalization in political life—whether it is around the figure of the President or the majority system for electing members of Parliament—leads to strategies of differentiation and individualization that prevent compromises from being reached. Its usual functioning relies on numbers and force—and, in the absence of the first, the temptation is to lean strongly on the second. Macron’s successive governments, therefore, have made extensive use of the constitutional prerogatives meant to bring Parliament to heel: using “bloc voting” that allows them to exclude amendments; using their agenda-setting powers to limit the time spent debating the most controversial bills; overruling the decisions of the chair of the Finance Committee on what is or is not valid parliamentary initiative; and so forth. The most infamous of those tools likely is Article 49, Paragraph 3, which allows the government to pass bills without a vote as long as MNAs do not adopt a motion of no confidence—which the opposition so far has not managed to achieve (Bloquet 2023). This Article 49.3 has been used for disputed bills and every finance-related bill. Despite this accumulation of advantages, the government’s plans often were defeated—enough so that Emmanuel Macron eventually decided to dissolve the National Assembly in June 2024, triggering new elections. This resulted in an even more divided assembly and major problems with government formation.

The situation of minority government so far has added significant tension to the relationship between the executive and the legislative branches, as it clashes with both party culture and electoral incentives. If this does put Parliament back in the center of the political game, how those new stakes are handled mostly relies on overt power moves and conflicts between two differently equipped sides. Whether those eventually will resolve with the newly elected legislature and whether Parliament will end up strengthened or weakened from this new strife remains to be seen.

The situation of minority government so far has added significant tension to the relationship between the executive and the legislative branches because it clashes with both party culture and electoral incentives.