But the long night of French democracy is not yet over. Le Pen and his ilk (including former aide Bruno Megret) have qualified to run candidates in at least 319 constituencies when France votes for the 577 members of the national assembly. While it’s doubtful the far right would win more than a small fraction of these seats, it’s got the potential to wield a lot of clout in individual races. If it wins even 15 or 20 seats, it could play a pivotal role in a divided assembly.
Such prospects have many columnists, a few politicians and no end of chain-smoking, espresso-sipping cafe-goers talking about the need for a new constitution to establish the sixth republic since 1793. The Fifth Republic, written into law at the behest of Charles De Gaulle in 1958, has been revised several times. But partisans of a new constitution think that’s just not enough. De Gaulle intended a strong presidential system pulling a more or less pliable assembly behind it. The president was elected for seven years and parliament for a five-year term. The president could dissolve parliament more or less at will. But in the 1980s the whole apparatus went out of sync. Socialist President Francois Mitterrand, five years into his first term in 1986, found himself with a parliament controlled by a Gaullist coalition. He managed to regain control when he was reelected in 1988, then lost it again in 1993. Two years later Gaullist President Jacques Chirac was elected, but dissolved parliament a year before he had to, in 1997, and lost control to the Socialists for five years until-well, until today, when Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin finally resigned. It’s these periods of “cohabitation” between presidents of one party and prime ministers of another that the new-republicans would like to eliminate.
“This is not a normal balance of power,” says political scientist Yves Meny, an expert on corruption and populism in European politics. “It is not, as in the United States, a system designed for checks and balances. It’s checks and balances by accident, not intent.” But what would a new republic look like? Some advocates call for a more presidential system. They say the prime minister’s post should be eliminated, and parliament should be elected for the same regular term as the top man. (Last year the Fifth Republic was revised to reduce the presidential term to five years.) Others say it’s the president’s power that ought to be relegated to the dustbin of historical republics. They would like to see a French system more like other parliamentary democracies in Europe. Not the least of the problems with these proposals, however, is that the presidential model sounds, yes, vaguely American, while the parliamentary one is rather English. No self-respecting Gaul is going to accept a government tainted by those Anglo-Saxon rosbifs.
“The problem is not so much in the institutions as in the programs offered by these governments,” says Emmanuel Todd, an iconoclastic social scientist and political demographer. “People just don’t know what to do when they come to power.” But is any other model really better? Certainly the electoral example of the USA in 2000 doesn’t offer much consolation, in Todd’s view. “The two great traditional republics [France and the United States] are just producing crazy presidential elections,” he says. “I find it impossible to say whether democracy has just been saved-or is this the emergence of post-democratic age where democracy is meaningless?”
Like most plans for sweeping changes that come in the wake of botched elections, the idea of a new republic will probably subside when business goes back to usual later this summer. If it goes back to usual at all.
