Some get carried away, others complain, but everyone seems helpless: since July, the result of the legislative elections has plunged political leaders into immense perplexity. In the absence of an absolute majority, no one seems to know how to form a government, build a majority, or negotiate a roadmap. In a country where, since 1962, all the presidents of the Republic, with the exception of François Mitterrand in 1988 and Emmanuel Macron in 2022, have been able to rely on MPs with their fingers on the seam of their trousers, parliamentary pluralism appears to be a real calamity.
Many European leaders must have smiled as they listened to the complaints and indignation of French politicians. In most of our neighbouring countries, “Minority Parliaments”according to the expression of the Elysée, are in fact the norm: far from making France a cursed land, the legislative elections of July, notes the political scientist Thierry Chopin, inscribe French political life in the “straight grain” European dynamics. In a country like Germany, where no party has governed alone since 1949, adds researcher Martin Baloge, the current fragmentation of the Palais-Bourbon is nothing new. “confusing”.
Over the decades, our neighbours have learned to manage the fragmentation of their political landscape with patience and skill: for many years, they have been betting on negotiation. Following the 2023 Spanish elections, the king had asked the leader of the party that came out on top, the conservative party, to form a majority before calling on the socialist party after its failure: after several weeks of discussions, Pedro Sanchez had formed a coalition government by concluding an alliance with the radical left and the nationalists. One hundred and sixteen days after the election, he obtained the investiture of the Chamber.
The members of the German Bundestag have also long mastered the art of coalition building. In this parliamentary system where the head of state is content with an honorary function, the name of the chancellor does not come out of the presidential hat one fine morning: it is the fruit of a long negotiation between political parties – eighty-six days in 2013, one hundred and seventy-one days in 2017 and seventy-three days in 2021. This long-term work results in the drafting of a roadmap of around a hundred pages that the members of the Bundestag are required to respect once the coalition government is formed.
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