How France governs itself under a constitution written in a crisis

How the Fifth Republic came to exist

The constitution France lives under was written in a crisis. In May 1958 a revolt by settlers and army officers in Algiers threatened the Fourth Republic, whose governments had lasted an average of six months since 1946, and the National Assembly recalled Charles de Gaulle on condition that he draft a new constitution. Voters approved it by referendum in September and it was promulgated on 4 October 1958.

The Fourth Republic had been a parliamentary system in which the assembly made and unmade cabinets at will. The document that replaced it moved a large share of power to the head of state, restricted what parliament may legislate on, and gave the executive procedural weapons for forcing bills through. A further amendment in 1962, again by referendum, made the president directly elected, which converted the office from a dignified arbiter into the most powerful elected post in Europe.

That settlement has now lasted longer than any French constitution except the Napoleonic one, and it has been amended more than twenty times without being replaced. The most consequential changes shortened the presidential term to five years and, in 2008, rebalanced a little of the power back towards parliament and opened constitutional review to ordinary litigants.

What the president can and cannot do

Article 6 of the constitution provides that the president is elected for five years by direct universal suffrage. The term was seven years until a referendum aligned it with the parliamentary term, which had the practical effect of making a president and an assembly of the same colour the normal case rather than the exception.

The president appoints the prime minister, chairs the Council of Ministers, commands the armed forces, negotiates and ratifies treaties, and may dissolve the National Assembly and call fresh elections, though not more than once in a year. There is no veto over legislation. A bill may be returned to parliament for a second reading, and if parliament passes it again it must be promulgated. Removal is possible only through parliament sitting as a High Court, for a breach of duty manifestly incompatible with the office.

What limits the presidency is arithmetic rather than law. Because the government answers to the National Assembly and not to the president, a president whose opponents hold the Assembly must appoint a prime minister the Assembly will accept, and then watch domestic policy run out of a rival office. The arrangement has a name, cohabitation, and it has occurred three times.

How the two chambers differ

The National Assembly has 577 deputies elected directly for five-year terms in single-member districts. Voting is in two rounds: a candidate winning an absolute majority in the first round is elected, and otherwise the qualifying candidates go to a run-off decided by a plurality. Every seat is contested at each election, so an Assembly majority can turn over completely in a single day.

The Senate is built to move slowly. Its 348 members are chosen by an electoral college of roughly 165,000 local elected officials, which weights small communes heavily and gives rural France a standing voice in the legislature. Terms run six years, half the chamber is renewed every three years, and before a reform of 30 July 2004 terms ran nine years with a third renewed at a time. Of the 348, some 326 represent the metropolitan and overseas departments, ten the other dependencies and twelve French citizens living abroad.

When the two chambers disagree, the government may give the last word to the Assembly, so the Senate delays and revises rather than blocks.

How elections shape the party system

Almost every French election runs in two rounds, and the second round is where the system does its work. In a presidential election the top two candidates from the first round meet a fortnight later, so the winner always leaves with an absolute majority of votes cast, whatever the first round looked like. In legislative elections a candidate winning an absolute majority in the first round takes the seat outright, and otherwise every candidate clearing a threshold of registered voters in the constituency may stand in the run-off, which is decided by simple plurality. The design was meant to let voters choose sincerely in the first round and strategically in the second, and for four decades it produced a stable pattern of two broad blocs alternating in office. It has since produced something else. The first round now fragments across many candidates, the second round is often a contest between camps rather than parties, and a president can be elected with strong second-round support after a modest first-round score. The legislative calendar reinforces whatever the presidential election decided. Since the presidential term was cut to five years, Assembly elections fall a few weeks after the presidential one, and voters have usually given the new president a working majority. When they have not, the constitution offers no mechanism for breaking the deadlock beyond dissolution, which the president may use only once a year, and the procedural tools of Article 49.

Referendums remain part of the machinery and have been used to found the Fifth Republic, to make the presidency directly elected, and to approve or reject European treaties. A shared-initiative referendum introduced in 2008 requires backing from a fifth of parliament and a tenth of the electorate, and the thresholds have proved high enough that it has never produced a vote.

Why Article Forty-Nine matters so much

The best known clause of the constitution is the third paragraph of Article 49. A prime minister, after deliberation in the Council of Ministers, may make the passing of a finance bill or a social security financing bill an issue of confidence. The bill is then treated as passed without any vote on its substance, unless a motion of no confidence is tabled within twenty-four hours and carried by an absolute majority of all members of the Assembly. The same procedure may be used once per parliamentary session on one other bill.

The arithmetic is what makes it powerful. Only votes in favour of censure are counted, so abstentions and absences work for the government, and a majority of the whole chamber is required rather than a majority of those voting. Governments have used the clause to pass budgets and pension reforms that could not have survived a straight vote, and each use produces a censure motion, a debate and a headline. Article 49 also runs in the other direction. Its second paragraph lets a tenth of the Assembly table a censure motion at any time, and Article 50 obliges the prime minister to resign the government if one carries. A government has fallen this way once under the Fifth Republic.

Who decides whether a law is constitutional

The Constitutional Council has nine appointed members, three each named by the president, the president of the Senate and the president of the National Assembly. Three seats are renewed every three years and terms are nine years and not renewable. Former presidents of the republic sit as members by right.

For its first half century the council reviewed bills only before promulgation, and only if referred by one of a small set of officials, which meant a law that reached the statute book was effectively beyond challenge. Article 61-1 changed that. If a litigant in a live case argues that a legislative provision infringes constitutional rights and freedoms, the Conseil d'État or the Cour de Cassation may refer the question to the council, which must rule within a fixed period. A statute in force can now be struck down at the request of an ordinary party to a lawsuit.

Alongside it sits the Conseil d'État, the supreme administrative court, which annuls decrees that trespass on the domain reserved to statute, while the Constitutional Council polices the reverse. The division between what parliament may legislate on and what the government may regulate by decree is itself constitutional, and both bodies exist partly to referee it.

What the republic refuses to divide

France is a unitary state and the constitution says the republic is indivisible. There are eighteen integral regions, five of them overseas, along with departments and communes, and the decentralisation laws of the early 1980s gave them budgets and elected assemblies. What they do not have is legislative power of their own. A region cannot pass a law, and the same civil and criminal codes apply from Dunkirk to Cayenne.

The republic is also secular by law, under a separation of church and state dating from 1905, and it declines to recognise minorities as legal categories. The state collects no official statistics by ethnicity or religion, which is a deliberate consequence of the doctrine that citizens face the state as individuals rather than as members of groups.

Overseas, the picture is more graded. The five overseas departments are governed like metropolitan ones, while New Caledonia, French Polynesia and Wallis and Futuna hold statuses with their own institutions, and New Caledonia's is written into the constitution itself. France: overview sets the territories in context and France: history deals with how they were acquired.

Where French sovereignty is shared

France is a founding member of the United Nations and holds one of the five permanent seats on the Security Council, with the veto that comes with it. It built an independent nuclear deterrent in the 1960s, becoming the fourth state to hold nuclear weapons, and during the Cold War it withdrew from the integrated military command of its western alliance while remaining a member of the alliance itself. That combination, an autonomous deterrent inside a collective defence pact, remains the shape of French defence policy.

The other pooling of sovereignty is European and much deeper. France signed the founding treaties of what became the European Union on 25 March 1957, joined the Council of Europe at its creation in 1949, and adopted the euro, which means monetary policy for the metropolitan territory and the overseas departments is set by an institution the French state does not control. European law takes precedence over national statute in the fields the treaties cover, and a substantial share of what parliament debates is the transposition of decisions taken elsewhere.

That transfer has been contested at the ballot box more than once. French voters approved the Maastricht Treaty narrowly in 1992 and rejected the proposed European constitutional treaty in 2005, after which the substance returned in another form and was ratified by parliament rather than by referendum. The episode is still cited in French argument about who decides.

France also belongs to the G7 from 1977 and the G20 from 1999, and to the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie from 1970, which links it to states across Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific through a shared administrative language rather than through a treaty of defence or trade. France: economy takes up what euro membership does to fiscal policy.