The fuse under the Fifth Republic

France’s national crisis expresses itself in multiple ways. It is about poor economic growth, rising public debt and high unemployment. It is about the smouldering anger of France’s ex-colonial minorities. It is about discredited political parties: the left trapped in anti-capitalist platitudes that its reformist wing is unable to squash, the right overwhelmed by scandals and factional disputes. More and more, however, France’s crisis is about the presidential system of government and the Fifth Republic itself.

Le Point, a French news magazine, commented in June that “France finds itself now in a pre-revolutionary situation where everything is becoming possible”. In one scenario Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader, will capitalise on the crisis to humiliate her rivals in the 2017 presidential election. Another, far more preferable outcome is that French reformers redesign the Fifth Republic as a more democratic, transparent and parliamentarian system.

By the standards of western democracies, and of France’s four previous republics, starting in 1792 and ending in 1958, the present constitution grants remarkably broad executive powers to the president. This is the doing of Charles de Gaulle. Having tailor-made the presidency for himself, he rammed through a referendum of doubtful legality in 1962 that mandated direct presidential elections.

The effect was to place intolerably large expectations on a modern French president. He – there has yet to be a she – is required to have a close, almost mystical relationship with the French people, regal in tone but resting on his democratic legitimacy. He must govern wisely and decisively, act with dignity in his public and personal life, embody French ideals and be in tune with the democratic spirit of the age. Even the Bourbon monarchs and Napoleon III had it easier.

De Gaulle alone pulled off the feat: as the writer André Malraux observed, the former general and Free French leader-in-exile was “equal to his myth”. But all of De Gaulle’s successors have struggled to fill his shoes – not surprisingly, because they lead a France that has less international freedom of action, is more economically troubled and no longer desists from investigating the professional and private lives of its presidents.

Unfortunately, the personal defects and political ineptitude of Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande, the most recent incumbents, have sunk the presidency to depths that would make De Gaulle turn in his grave. After his victory in the 2007 election, Mr Sarkozy embraced an ostentatious lifestyle that bordered on vulgarity, whilst failing – like Mr Hollande – to get to grips with France’s intensifying social and economic challenges. Since his defeat in 2012, Mr Sarkozy has been placed under formal inquiry in a corruption and influence-peddling case.

As for Mr Hollande, the self-styled Monsieur Normal who promised to restore decorum to the presidency, his biographer asserts that, upon entering the Elysée Palace, he asked an aide: “How do I get out of here without anyone seeing me?” He might as well have got straight to the point and requested a motorcycle helmet and directions to the Rue du Cirque, home of a secret lover.

The notion of a Sixth Republic, less presidential in nature, was a theme in the 2007 campaign of Ségolène Royal, the Socialist candidate and Mr Hollande’s former partner. She lost, but the idea remains alive. True, fundamental constitutional change tends not to occur smoothly in France. Each of the earlier four French republics expired – in 1804, 1851, 1940 and 1958 – in a coup or a war. But the fuses under the Fifth Republic’s presidential system are burning. Politicians must waste no more time before giving new life to French democracy.

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Letter in response to this editorial:

France needs a government that encourages free enterprise / From Mr ​Simon Fletcher