The Fifth Republic is dead. She had been seriously ill for years. And on March 16, President Emmanuel Macron gave him the coup de grace when he approved the controversial pension reform by decree, without going through the vote of Parliament. In the minority in the National Assembly, Macron decided to push his generous constitutional powers to the limit to impose his will, at the risk of seriously questioning the democratic foundations of the regime established in 1958 by General De Gaulle. After that, there will be those who will try to keep the Fifth Republic alive. But he’s nothing more than a zombie.
The tumultuous post-war years in France, with the conflicts for the independence of Indochina and Algeria, the threat of a military coup and a proverbial political instability – there were twenty governments in eight years – put an end to the fleeting Fourth Republic, established after the defeat of Nazi Germany. Called to the rescue by President René Coty to assume the leadership of the Government, Charles de Gaulle, the hero of the Liberation, administered a horse cure: a new Constitution -voted by 83% of the French- which established a regime presidentialist without parion.
The aim was to guarantee the stability of the Government above all, at the cost of cornering the minorities – thanks to the double-round majoritarian electoral system – and of granting enormous prerogatives to the head of state: the French president, far from being a representative or arbitral figure, it concentrates a large part of the executive power and has the power to appoint and dismiss the Government, as well as to dissolve the National Assembly, at its discretion. Elected directly by the citizens, he is not answerable to anyone else, not to the Parliament – ​​which the most it can do is to start a process of impeachment in the event of a very serious breach of its obligations –, not to the justice system – which can only pursue after leaving the Elysée and never for the actions taken in relation to his position. In France the president has the last word. Like a republican Sun King.
The system of the Fifth Republic, based on what has been called “rationalized parliamentarism”, has fulfilled the mission entrusted to it by De Gaulle. But at a high price: it has simultaneously opened a great rift between power – held for decades by the Parisian or assimilated technocratic elites – and the citizens, who have become accustomed to resolving themselves in the street, through demonstrations of force – often with violence – , the political struggle. Not infrequently they have gotten away with it: one of the first projects to reform the pension system, promoted in 1995 by Alain Juppé, ended up being withdrawn. In 2006, the project to make youth employment more flexible, promoted by Dominique de Villepin, was repealed after it had been approved and published in the official gazette! In 2019, the yellow vests got the Macron government to back down on the new fuel tax…
It might seem that the current crisis over pension reform – a politically very delicate issue, given the sensitivity of the French to any social cut – is a new chapter in this dynamic of confrontation, from which negotiation and compromise are excluded . But today it is something more. The French are not only protesting the increase in the retirement age from 62 to 64, but also the authoritarian method of passing it.
The whole process has been flawed. At the outset, the reform was processed as a rectification bill for the financing of Social Security – that is, a purported budget text -, with the aim of applying an accelerated procedure in Parliament. A question that apparently seems unimportant, but which could lead to the invalidation of the law by the Constitutional Council, which must be pronounced on April 14.
More serious was the decision to resort to the already famous article 49.3 of the Constitution, which allows the Government to approve a law by decree without going through the vote of the Parliament, which can only stop it – with little chance – by presenting a motion of censure against the Executive. The controversial item, equivalent to a box or girdle, has been used other times. The Macron Government itself, which lost its majority in the Assembly in 2022 – a first in France, after decades of absolute majorities – has already activated it 11 times in less than a year. But never, until now, to push forward a law of this magnitude.
From his distant vantage point on the Elysee, Macron decided to approve it without calibrating the impact of his decision. Because it is no longer about pensions, but about the lack of democratic sensitivity of power. The French president defends himself against all authoritarianism by claiming that he was elected with a program that included pension reform. It certainly was. But there are glaring omissions in this argument: in the second round of last year’s presidential elections, Macron won nearly 60% of the vote; however, many were borrowed to hold back her rival, the far-right Marine le Pen. In fact, in the first round he only had 27.8%. And his party, in subsequent legislatures, was left with 27.5% of the votes. Little democratic legitimacy it seems.
Macron’s desperate maneuver with pensions, his gesture of authority, has shown the definitive exhaustion of the system. The Fifth Republic will take more or less time to give way to an eventual Sixth Republic. But the current one has already sung its swan song.
