French democracy is in crisis. What else is new?

JOHN LICHFIELD

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Revolution is in the air. After three months of turmoil over President Emmanuel Macron’s flagship pensions reform, France is tempted once again to rip up its constitution and start afresh.

Will 2023 go down — after 1789, 1830, 1848, 1870, 1940 and 1958 — as the year which forced radical change in the method of government of perhaps the least-governable large country in the Western world?

Reputable French historians and political commentators are talking of a “democratic crisis” or a “crise de régime.” The pensions dispute has, they say, transcended arguments over whether the French should retire at 62 or 64.

The French president’s deployment of a full armory of special constitutional powers to impose a reform rejected by 70 percent of French adults has created — or accelerated — a deeper, political malaise.

In the age of the internet and contempt for les élites, the top-down, elected monarchy devised by Charles de Gaulle 65 years ago is no longer workable, the commentators say.

The high-handed power of the president and the executive to short-circuit a normal parliamentary vote (under Article 49.3 of the Fifth Republic’s constitution) has been used 100 times since 1958.

On all the previous occasions, there was grumbling by opposition politicians. This time there has been a starburst of popular fury, some of it synthetic and some real.

Close to my home in a quiet part of rural Normandy, a scribbled, road-side sign reads: “49.3=1789,” a reference to the year the French Revolution began. Demonstrators during Macron’s visit to Hérault in southern France last week shouted, amongst other things: “A bas la cinquième République” (Down with the Fifth Republic).

The Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vest) provincial revolt of 2018-19 was already, in part, a demand for greater popular control over government and a rejection of traditional, political parties and state institutions. Now, young people are astonished to discover that that the Fifth Republic gives overriding powers to the president and executive against parliament and people.

Something has snapped, or is close to snapping, in France’s trust in its system of government. That does not necessarily mean that revolution — or even change — is on the way. A country that suffers a nervous breakdown over a modest pension reform is unlikely to reach easy agreement on a new constitution.

All the French regime changes of the last 234 years have followed armed revolutions or lost wars. Neither fate seems likely to befall France at present.

In some respects, this is a Macron crisis more than a constitutional crisis. In Charles de Gaulle’s original conception, the president stood aloof from the day-to-day quarrels of parties/politicians. He maintained a direct connection to “the people.”Will 2023 go down alongside 1789 as as a year which forced radical change in the method of government? | Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Macron has set out to reform France for its own good whether “the people” like it or not. He takes the view that many of France’s ills — and certainly its troubled state finances — result from past presidential decisions to ditch reforms in the face of street protests.

Special constitutional powers were created for a reason, Macron says. He has a duty to use them. One day, the country will thank him.

The political historian, Jean Garrigues, suggests that this is a misreading of not just De Gaulle’s constitution but of French history. “Macron is welded to his institutional legitimacy but he forgets another legitimacy inscribed in our history since the French Revolution: the need to listen to the voices of the citizenry, as expressed through the unions and the media.”

There is truth in that. But it is doubtful, however, whether the original, semi-detached De Gaulle pattern of presidency could work successfully in a less deferential, social media age.

Whose “voices” do you listen to in a country as divided and querulous as France?

The more things change, the more they stay the same

The chaotic Gilets Jaunes revolt was a warning but it was also a reminder of why the Fifth Republic exists. No two Gilets Jaunes could agree on anything for long. They hated all leaders, including their own.

Returning to a more parliamentary system — or the perpetual referenda that the Yellow Vests favoured — would risk a return to the muddled Third Republic governments of the 1930s or the parliamentary warfare of the Fourth Republic from 1946 to 1958.

There were 28 governments in the 12 years of the Fourth Republic, some lasting only a few days. De Gaulle concluded in 1958 (but it was already his view in 1945) that France was incompatible with pure parliamentary democracy. A top-down system was needed.

The president would preside. Day-to-day government would be left to politicians, if necessary, but also to clever technocrats.

That pattern survives, in a sense, to this day. Macron’s Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, is a technocrat, rather than a politician. So, arguably, is Macron.

Government by technocrats and parliaments which can be short-circuited by presidents appear bizarre in an age that is suspicious of “elites” and demands more direct, democratic “control.” The Fifth Republic constitution has become an anomaly among democratic nations.The chaotic Gilets Jaunes revolt was a warning but it was also a reminder of why the Fifth Republic exists | Chris McGrath/Getty Images

But what might replace it? What would a Sixth Republic look like?

The French political battlefield is divided three ways, just as it was in the 1950s. Political parties are held in contempt, as they were in the 1950s. The ill-tempered National Assembly, elected last June, has no natural, or unnatural, majority — just like those in the 1950s.

A parliamentary system of government, on the British or the more complex German model, might rapidly sink into Fourth Republic quicksands. The radical Left bloc led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon favors a parliamentary system (but often behaves in a boorishly unparliamentary way).

All other political forces, including Marine Le Pen’s far right, broadly support the present system. In a parliamentary France, Le Pen could never be elected prime minister; she does have a slender hope of becoming president in a two-round presidential election.

In other words, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. There is hunger for “change” in France. There is no consensus for changes.

Macron has promised to dust off plans for institutional reform — essentially tinkering with the present system — but his hopes of winning agreement on anything substantial in his remaining four years are close to zero.

To misquote Winston Churchill, the Fifth Republic constitution has become, after 65 years, the worst possible form of government for France — except for all the others.