Exceptional in its duration, the transition carried out by the government of Gabriel Attal between July 16 and this Thursday, September 5 with Michel Barnier is the second longest in post-war French political history.
By appointing Michel Barnier to Matignon on Thursday, September 5, Emmanuel Macron put an end to a political transition that was beginning to drag on seriously. The government of Gabriel Attal, who had submitted his resignation to the President on July 16, was in fact managing “current affairs” for 51 days. In recent French political history (since the post-war period), this makes it the second longest-serving resigning government. As recently explained Release, Only one of the four governments led by Georges Pompidou did better – or worse – by remaining in office for 62 days between October 5 and December 7, 1962.
These two cases are exceptional for the Fifth Republic, partly conceived and implemented by Charles de Gaulle and Michel Debré in 1958 to remedy the political instability that reigned during the previous regime, the Fourth Republic (1946-1958). Thus, as the graph below shows, of the twelve resigning governments that have remained in office the longest since the post-war period, only three were under the Fifth Republic and nine under the Fourth.
And if Attal’s resigning government ultimately did not beat Pompidou’s record, it did highlight a flagrant weakness in the 1958 Constitution in terms of the separation of powers. Because Gabriel Attal, as well as 16 of his ministers, were able to remain in the government (which, with the President, constitutes the executive branch) for nearly two months while also being newly elected to the National Assembly (one of the two components of the legislative branch). And this, despite Article 23 of the constitutional text which provides that “the functions of member of the government are incompatible with the exercise of any parliamentary mandate.”
At the very least problematic, this accumulation was raised by the left and was the subject of debates by constitutionalists during the election of the president of the National Assembly at the beginning of July, in which the 17 minister-deputies took part.
