Political system of France

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The current political system in France is determined by the Constitution of the Fifth French Republic . The most important features are the democratic and republican form of government with a strong executive within the framework of a semi-presidential system of government . France has a bicameral system .

Despite some reforms to strengthen the regions, France is still a decentralized unitary state . The separation between religion and state ( French laïcité ) has been stronger in France since 1905 than in many other European countries.

State institutions

The French political system

executive

The French political system is characterized by a double executive . The areas of power are divided between the President of the Republic and the government .

president

The head of state is the (directly by the people for five years quinquennat , before that since 2000, seven years) elected President ( President ). There is the possibility of one-time re-election (since 2008, before re-election was possible as often as desired).

The President appoints the Prime Minister and, on his proposal, the government. He is Chairman of the Council of Ministers and other important bodies and Commander in Chief of the French Armed Forces . In this capacity, he determines the use of France's nuclear weapons ( force de frappe ). He has the right to dissolve the National Assembly; however, the National Assembly may only be dissolved once within a year. At the suggestion of the government or both chambers of parliament, the president can initiate a referendum on a draft law.

In the French constitutional reality since the beginning of the Fifth French Republic there has been the Domaine réservé (a reserved area); the foreign and security policy form that domain of the president. This is often justified with Articles 14 and 15 of the constitution , but is not clearly regulated there. The President can thus represent France alone at summits .

The strong position of the president did not develop until after 1958 (see History of France since 1958 ). Before that, between 1876 and 1958, the average term of office of a government was eight months; after 1789 the country had 16 constitutions. In the Algerian war, finally, the military began to act “without feedback” with politics. In research, the 5th Republic is therefore also referred to as the "republican monarchy".

The criticism of the special position of the president according to the constitution of the Fifth Republic was initially strong. The new constitution was caricatured or criticized by the then opposition politician François Mitterrand (French President from 1981 to 1995) as a “permanent coup d'état ” ( Le Coup d'État permanent ).

In the event of a state emergency , the President has the comprehensive sole decision, whereby the National Assembly then meets directly and may not be dissolved during the emergency.

If the Constitutional Council determines that the President cannot carry out his duties (resignation, death), he is temporarily represented by the Senate President. Until now, only Alain Poher had to take over the duties of President: after the resignation of Charles de Gaulle in 1969 and after the death of Georges Pompidou in 1974.

government

The head government ( gouvernement ) is the Prime Minister . The government is directly responsible to parliament for administration and armed forces.

The government is appointed by the President, the ministers and other members of the government ( subordinate ministers , state secretaries) on the proposal of the previously appointed prime minister. The government remains in office until she resigns; the constitution does not provide for a term of office. The government must resign if the National Assembly expresses its suspicion. The president, on the other hand, cannot dismiss the government on his own initiative, but only if it declares its resignation. In France, however, it is a convention that the government resigns when a president is inaugurated. It is also customary for the government to step down the day after the second round of elections to the National Assembly, even if it has won a parliamentary majority.

The Prime Minister heads the government. He is responsible for the implementation of the law. With the consent of the President, he makes appointments to civil and military offices. It can issue ordinances in many areas.

The government meets as a Council of Ministers ( Conseil des ministres ) under the leadership of the President . The prime minister, ministers and assigned ministers always take part in this, the state secretaries only if their area of ​​responsibility is affected.

Cooperation with parliament

The executive is strong against the legislature at all levels. The government sets the parliamentary agenda. The areas in which Parliament can take a legislative initiative are very precisely named and listed in the Constitution. All other questions can be settled by the government without the involvement of parliament.

Nevertheless, the government is dependent on cooperation with parliament. The president only appoints a prime minister from among the ranks of the parliamentary majority because the prime minister can be overthrown by parliament through a vote of no confidence with an absolute majority. When the parliamentary majority and the President of the Republic belong to different political camps, the President is forced to choose the Prime Minister from a politically opposing party . This situation is called " cohabitation ".

legislative branch

Legislation in France is done by parliament. Since 1875 (see French Third Republic # Institutions ) the parliament has consisted of two chambers :

Parliament controls the government, drafts laws and passes them. The two chambers do not have equal rights: in the event of disagreement, the National Assembly can override the Senate. In almost all legislative proposals, the drafts move back and forth between the two chambers ( navette ). The Senate has the right to veto constitutional changes . During the legislative process, the President can refer a bill back to Parliament, but only once per bill. This has happened twice in 50 years.

Both chambers can meet together as a congress ( Congrès du Parlement français ) for certain occasions . This can be done for constitutional amendments that do not then require a referendum, as otherwise, for speeches by the President, Art. 18, and for the approval of the admission of another member state to the European Union, Art. 88-5 .

Judiciary

The main task of the French judiciary is defined in the Constitution. The judiciary is, in accordance with Article 66, a "guardian of individual liberty." The judiciary in France consists of two fundamentally different areas:

There is also a constitutional court ( Conseil constitutionnel ).

The offenses are assigned to one of the following three courts, depending on the type of crime:

  • Tribunal de police - administrative offenses
  • Tribunal correctionnel - offense
  • Cour d'assises - crimes

In contrast to the German system, the investigative work is not carried out by public prosecutors but by a specially set up “tribunal d'instruction”. At the request of the public prosecutor's office, the Juge d'instruction ("investigating judge") opens an investigation and does the investigative work for all three criminal courts of first instance as well as for the court of appeal in criminal matters.

Parties

France has a multi-party system with many parties being founded, split off and renamed. However, the parties often form alliances in order to have better chances in the majority election . The most important alliance was the Union pour la démocratie française of 1978, which united the most important liberal and Christian democratic parties of the (right) political center and reached 23.9 percent in the parliamentary elections of that year. The spectrum of parties is permanently dominated by conservative Gaullism or parties that follow this tradition, currently the Les Républicains party , called Union pour un mouvement populaire (UMP) until 2015 .

Most of the French parties are not mass parties. This is why the organizational structures of French parties tend to be weaker than those of the German ones, for example.

Since the Second World War, political currents can be identified that have ensured continuity despite the many party names.

François Mitterrand, President 1981 to 1995, was a leader of the political left for many years, founded the Parti socialiste and led the left to government for the first time in the Fifth Republic.

The Left: The political left in France has traditionally been divided into an extreme left and a moderate, parliamentary left. The demarcation has become less clear in recent years because there are hardly any parties that reject the parliamentary form of government:

  • Extreme left: The extreme left in France today mainly includes various Trotskyist parties such as Lutte Ouvrière , which have won seats in some elections. Historically, the Parti communiste français also belongs to the extreme left. It was one of the strongest communist parties in Western Europe in the fourth and fifth republic and received around twenty percent of the vote. As a strictly Marxist-Leninist party, however, it remained isolated. Since the PCF first opened up to cooperation with the PS in the first presidency of François Mitterrand and even more strongly in the government of Lionel Jospin (Gauche plurielle) and since then has been regularly associated with them in electoral alliances and coalitions, it has generally become the moderate left counted.
  • Front de gauche ; it is an alliance mainly from PCF and Parti de gauche and stands between the extreme and the moderate left as it pursues an opposition rate against the presidency of Francois Hollande , but is nevertheless as part of the left-wing majority in the French Senate in the Government policy involved.
  • Moderate left (often also parliamentary left): The moderate left is mainly dominated by the Parti Socialiste . This emerged in 1969 under François Mitterrand from the Section française de l'Internationale ouvrière . One of the unifying factors was Mitterrand's unsuccessful but respectable candidacy in the 1965 presidential election . With a controversial collaboration with the communists, he actually managed to move into the presidential palace in 1981; this alliance soon fell apart. Apart from the European elections in 2009 , when the PS was just ahead of the Greens, the PS has since expanded its position on the moderate left and is currently by far the strongest party. In addition, the moderate left usually includes the French Greens ( Europe Écologie-Les Verts ), as well as various smaller parties that, like the Greens, usually enter into electoral alliances with the PS.
Valéry Giscard d'Estaing , President 1974 to 1981, led the liberal conservatives and in 1978 created the Union pour la démocratie française in the hope that a strong center force could form a “presidential majority” over the long term.

The center: The political center in France has long been a large, independent bloc. Especially since the establishment of the UMP rallying movement on the moderate right, which expressly claims to organize the centrists, the center has been reduced to a few small parties. However, there are approaches to organize a larger party bloc again after the UMP loses its integrative power in the middle:

  • Radical Party: The Radical Party (where “radical” in French parlance stands for the German term “liberal”): Above all before the war, but also after the war, the Radical Party was next to the Socialists the most important party of the center-left and several times represented the Prime minister. The Parti républicain, radical et radical-socialiste got its name mainly from radicalism . She worked with the socialists in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1972 the party split: while the Parti radical de gauche continued to cooperate with the socialists and are now usually counted on the left, the Parti radical valoisien joined the centrist UDF and in 2002 became an independent part of the right-wing UMP collection . Since 2011, PR has played a leading role in the attempt to establish a new alliance of the political center, the Alliance républicaine, écologiste et sociale .
  • Republicans (right-wing liberals): The more right-wing liberal conservatives were initially gathered in the Center national des indépendants et paysans . Since the 1960s, its role has been taken over by a split, the “independent republicans” of Finance Minister Valéry Giscard d'Estaing . After party renaming and reshuffling, Giscard, then already President, founded the party alliance Union pour la démocratie française in 1978 , which also had its own members. The centrist UDF joined Giscard's Republicans as well as the Radical Socialists, Christian Democrats and Social Democrats (a split from the Socialists). In 2002, the majority of the UDF parties switched to the newly founded right-wing collection movement UMP, while a smaller part remained independent, in particular the Mouvement démocrate .
  • Christian Democrats: After the war, the “People's Republicans” of the Mouvement républicain populaire were initially the largest French party on the right or center-right. At the latest in the 1950s, however, she had to cede this position to the Gaullists. Since the 1960s, the current appeared under different names in different combinations, for the longest time (1976–1995) as the Center des démocrates sociaux . It worked with the UDF since 1978. The Christian Democrats have been part of the right-wing UMP rallying movement since 2002.
Charles de Gaulle , president from 1959 to 1969 and founder of the fifth republic, is still dominant for the political tradition of the French right, Gaullism .

The right: The right is also divided into a moderate part, which is dominated by Gaullism , and an extreme, nationalist right:

  • Moderate right (Gaullism): The moderate right goes back above all to Charles de Gaulle , the World War General and later president, who stood for a conservative, nationalist, eurosceptic and centralist France. The party supporting him appeared under different names. After his resignation as president in 1969, the party structures were expanded and the party was increasingly opened to the political center. This tradition culminated in the Rassemblement pour la République 2002 in the Union pour un mouvement populaire , a party that wants to organize currents from the center alongside the Gaullists. The UMP is currently the dominant force of the moderate right; smaller right-wing parties hardly play a role anymore. In the final phase of Nicolas Sarkozy's presidency and after he was voted out of office, however, there were withdrawals from smaller parties in the UMP in an attempt to form new alliances of the center or the right, and massive disputes over direction within the UMP.
  • Extreme right: Because of the cooperation of the fascist or fascism-affine right with the German occupiers, right-wing populist and right-wing radical parties were initially discredited. However, electoral successes were celebrated by Poujadism in the 1950s . Since the European elections in 1984, the xenophobic and right-wing populist Front National (FN) has regularly achieved double-digit election results; In 2002, its then party leader Jean-Marie Le Pen made it into the second round of the presidential election. There are also some smaller parties on the extreme right.
    Michel Houellebecq said in an interview in 2015: “The political electoral system in France is based on the change of power between center-left and center-right. These two blocs, the bourgeois right and the socialist left, will always unite against the FN and know how to prevent its takeover, even though polls show it is already the strongest party in the country. […] The boycott that the left and the bourgeois conservatives are imposing on them [ Marine Le Pen ] is leading to a crisis of representative democracy. The exclusion of the Front national [...] creates a crooked and unhealthy situation. The basis of civil and national rights would like the two parties to come together, only the party leaders do not want it. "

decentralization

Until François Mitterrand came to power in 1981, France was a strongly centralized state: each department was headed by a prefect appointed directly by the government .

In 1982 the government transferred far-reaching fiscal and administrative rights to locally elected representatives. The decentralization of France established itself. Since March 28, 2003, an amendment to Article 1 of the Constitution has stipulated that the French state organization is decentralized. The economic distribution of forces shows a strong centralization towards the Paris basin ( Île-de-France ).

State organization
  • 35,416 municipalities (183 of them in the overseas departments). Chair: Municipal Council (Legislative) and Mayor ( Maire ; Executive)
  • 101 departments , 96 of them in metropolitan France and five départements et territoires d'outre-mer (DOM-TOM). The prefect represents the government. However, the executive branch is taken over by the chairman of the General Council (legislative branch )
  • and 18 regions , 13 of them in metropolitan France and five overseas. Legislature: Regional Council. The chairman of the regional council assumes executive power.

In practice, the centralistic tradition of France often means that a member of parliament, a member of the government or a party chairman is, in addition to his mandate or office in the central state, mayor of his constituency or his place of birth for years or decades. In fact, the mayor's office is then exercised by one of his confidants, his deputy.

literature

  • Constitution Française: La documentation française No. 1.04. Paris 2005, ISBN 978-2-11-005490-6 (French).
  • Georges-Marc Benamou : Comédie française - Choses vues au coeur du pouvoir . Fayard, Paris 2014, ISBN 978-2213678450 (French).
  • Udo Kempf: From de Gaulle to Chirac. The political system of France , Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen 1997, ISBN 3-531-12973-2 .
  • Adolf Kimmel : The constitutional text and the living constitutions , in: Marieluise Christadler & Henrik Uterwedde, ed .: Country report France. Series of publications by the Federal Agency for Civic Education, Vol. 360, Bonn 1999.
    • again in Kimmel & Uterwedde, Ed .: Country Report France. History, politics, economy, society. VS Verlag , 2nd ex. Edition Wiesbaden 2005, ISBN 3-531-14631-9 , pp. 247-267.
  • Adolf Kimmel: Legislation in the French political system . In: Wolfgang Ismayr (Ed.): Legislation in Western Europe. EU countries and the European Union. VS Verlag, Wiesbaden 2008, pp. 229-270.
  • Nikolaus Marsch, Yoan Vilain, Matthias Wendel (eds.): French and German constitutional law. Springer, Berlin / Heidelberg 2015, ISBN 978-3-642-45053-2 .
  • Jörg Requate: France since 1945 . UTB, Göttingen 2011, ISBN 978-3825235369 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Nikolaus Marsch, Yoan Vilain, Matthias Wendel (eds.): French and German constitutional law. Berlin / Heidelberg 2015, p. 128.
  2. ↑ Declaration on a French government website , accessed on January 20, 2014 (French)
  3. ^ Alfred Pletsch: Regional Geography France. WBG, Darmstadt 2003, 2nd edition, ISBN 3-534-11691-7 , here p. 330
  4. ↑ Pletsch p. 331
  5. ^ Peter Zürn: The republican monarchy. On the structure of the constitution of the fifth republic in France. Munich 1965; Maurice Duverger: La Monarchie républicaine. Paris 1974.
  6. ^ François Mitterrand : Le Coup d'État permanent. Plon, Paris 1964 (French).
  7. ↑ Article 89 of the French Constitution
  8. ↑ Cf. Hübner / Constantinesco: Introduction to French law
  9. ↑ Interview with Michel Houllebecq , Der Spiegel 10/2015, p. 129; accessed in January 2017
  10. ↑ List des communes , accessed in June 2017 (French)
  11. ↑ List des régions , accessed in June 2017 (French)
  12. ↑ Nils Minkmar : In the body of power. FAZ.net, November 18, 2014.
  13. ↑ Book trade edition at Leske + Budrich , Opladen.
  14. ↑ also published by the Federal Agency for Civic Education , Bonn 2005.