The President of the Republic is the “keystone” of our institutions. This formula from General de Gaulle, uttered in 1962 to justify his election by direct universal suffrage, is well known. It means that the regime of the Fifth Republic is presidential. Let us add that it is even in the case where the parliamentary majority is contrary to the presidential majority, and even more so if there is none.
Cohabitation, as François Mitterrand wanted it twice, as Jacques Chirac practiced it after him, is a constitutional heresy. “Do you see me choosing an opposition leader as Prime Minister? » confided the same De Gaulle to Alain Peyrefitte on the eve of the legislative elections of 1967. “Do you see me installing Mitterrand in Matignon? That would mean that the legitimacy of the government would rest, not on that of the President of the Republic, but on that of the Assembly! That would mean we would go back to the 4th! No, no! »
And he added: “If we do not have a majority in the Assembly, we will do without it! Provided of course that our troops are not completely crushed. This Constitution was made to govern without a majority. »
The President must govern, regardless of the composition of Parliament.
It is true that constitutionalists are more likely to say that our institutions are “semi-parliamentary”. But this qualifier does not mean that they are sometimes fully presidential, sometimes completely parliamentary. If the presidential camp loses the legislative elections, Parliament is not, and should not be, all-powerful.
The President must not disappear from the political game.
Our republican tradition, paradoxically inherited from the English monarchical system, has long anchored in our minds the idea that the Assembly alone expresses the will of the people, as if, facing it, there was still a king, not a President directly from of national sovereignty. More or less consciously, we are still victims of this bias. We must free ourselves from it.
Little by little, everyone must end up agreeing to reason as we do across the Atlantic, in this more than two-hundred-year-old republic founded on an integral presidential system, where no American would ever dare imagine that Congress could impose on the President his government team: on the one hand, a homogeneous executive, a guarantee of efficiency, and not divided against itself, President and ministers united; on the other the chambers, with which they must deal, a guarantee of democracy.
