France’s Fifth Republic Has Reached Its Limit

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CLAIRE BERLINSKI WRITES: A system built for two sides cannot govern a nation divided in three. France’s presidential monarchy has become the source of its own instability.

When Charles de Gaulle founded the Fifth Republic in 1958, he believed he had found a cure for France’s chronic instability. He endowed France with a massively powerful presidency, but also a parliament whose assent was required for significant action. For decades, this contradictory formula worked: larger-than-life leaders like de Gaulle himself usually got their majority — or, in any case, their way.

This article is the second in a series about political systems that may no longer be fit for purpose, distorting ideological reality or yielding unworkable outcomes

The problems the Fifth Republic was designed to solve were hardly imaginary. Between 1946 and 1958, France cycled through twenty-one governments. Cabinets were cobbled together from a dozen feuding parties, dependent on fragile coalitions that could be toppled by a parliamentary tantrum or a ministerial slight. Ideological divides among Gaullists, Communists, Christian Democrats, and Radicals were fierce, but the deeper fracture lay in a political culture addicted to negotiation without resolution.

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As France bled in Indochina and tore itself apart over Algeria, no one could hold power long enough to govern. The paralysis threatened to discredit parliamentary democracy itself and left the country vulnerable to demoralization, conspiracy, and military mutiny. De Gaulle’s remedy was an elected monarch, or very near it, whose legitimacy flowed directly from the people.

 

It had a good run. France enjoyed what it craved—grandeur, continuity, and men of stature who strode confidently across the world stage. The constitution’s weaknesses were masked by strong personalities: Pompidou, Mitterrand, and even Chirac dominated the system by force of character. So long as politics conformed to the familiar terrain of Left and Right, the Fifth Republic seemed, if not eternal, at least good enough.

But a constitution built for two parties can’t govern a nation fractured in three.

France in 2025 is divided, as Julius Caesar once remarked of Gaul, into three parts: a squabbling center of Macron’s technocrats, occasionally making tactical alliances with the enfeebled traditional parties; Marine Le Pen’s nationalist right, occasionally buttressed by the Republicans; and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s radical left, occasionally assisted by the Socialists (though they loathe each other). Each bloc has its own press, its own moral cosmology, its own diagnosis of France’s malaise. None commands a majority; none can compromise without self-annihilation. The presidency, deprived of its majority, has ceased to be a unifying symbol — save in the sense that these squabbling parrots can at least agree they loathe Macron. He has instead become a multiplier of division.

 

When the president and the government come from different parties, the French call it cohabitation. De Gaulle intended this to be exceptional: a constitutional curiosity. Under Macron it has become the norm. Since losing his majority in 2022, he has governed by decree, procedural sleight of hand, and constitutional gimmickry. Five prime ministers have come and gone in as many years, each lasting only long enough to become an object of scorn.

The brief (first) tenure of Sébastien Lecornu, Macron’s loyal defense minister turned sacrificial prime minister, was the latest proof of the system’s dysfunction. Tasked with passing a budget through a National Assembly that despises itself almost as much as it despises him, Lecornu lasted about a lettuce — a unit of political-time roughly twice as long as a Scaramucci. His government fell within a day of announcing its cabinet, undone by accusations of deceit from the right and obstruction from the left. Yet with comic fatalism, Macron promptly reappointed him. Memes depict Macron giving France the finger. Accurate enough. Thus, a constitution designed to fix the weaknesses of the Fourth Republic now ensures their recapitulation.

Beneath the melodrama lies a serious crisis. France’s debt exceeds 114 percent of GDP; its deficit hovers near six percent, twice the European limit. The European Commission has launched an “excessive deficit” procedure — a bureaucratic phrase that conceals genuine alarm. With interest rates rising, debt-service costs have become one of France’s largest budget items. But the parliamentary arithmetic is insoluble. Macron’s centrists propose cautious restraint — a €30 billion trim here, a symbolic nod to Brussels there. The far-left replies that austerity is treason against social justice and proposes wealth taxes and vast public spending. The right calls tax increases treason against the French people; Le Pen vows to defend household purchasing power and pensions while rejecting European budget rules as an affront to sovereignty. Among these three blocs lies only paralysis.

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This is not uniquely French. Across the democratic world, the old duopolies have collapsed. Britain’s Tories and Labour can barely contain their internal wars; America’s political system is a duel between incompatible realities; Germany survives only through joyless grand coalitions as its far-right rises. The digital age— great solvent of collective meaning — has turned politics into a perpetual outrage machine. It rewards purity and performance, not compromise, amplifying the extremes and corroding the center, and leaving the reasonable politically homeless. France has merely arrived first at the constitutional dead end toward which everyone else is hurtling.

De Gaulle’s defenders insist the problem is not the Fifth Republic but its tenants: better men and women could still make it work. Perhaps. But this is nostalgia masquerading as argument. The institutions were built for an age of print, party machines, and deference — when leaders could project authority because the public still believed in it. That world has vanished. No one now commands the legitimacy the presidency presumes. Jupiter, to borrow Macron’s conceit, is reduced to sending out push notifications.

Nicolas Sarkozy was the last French president — serving from 2007 to 2012 — who commanded the full force of personality to occupy the role as envisioned. Fittingly, today he was carted off in manacles. In an absurd turn of events, he is to serve a few years in prison for allegedly received campaign funding from Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi — and is being jailed even before his appeal plays out.

France has three choices.

First, cosmetic surgery—a Sixth Republic Lite. Tidy up cohabitation, limit presidential decrees, require the National Assembly to confirm the prime minister, perhaps hold mid-term reviews to force accountability. This would preserve the illusion of continuity while quietly admitting that the system no longer functions as intended.

Second, a semi-parliamentary system in the European manner. Keep a directly elected president but strip the role of its imperial pretensions. Make the prime minister, chosen by and answerable to the parliament, the true head of government. Adopt proportional representation to reflect France as it is, not as it was. This would normalize coalition-building and introduce the art of compromise to a political culture that has never known it.

Third, the clean break: a full parliamentary Sixth Republic. Abolish the executive presidency, retire the cult of the providential man that has haunted French politics since Napoleon, and give France a system that rewards negotiation over narcissism. Such a leap would require broad consensus and probably a constitutional convention. In today’s atmosphere, it is unlikely. But in a national crisis — perhaps a Le Pen presidency ending in gridlock — it might come faster than anyone expects. If de Gaulle wrote a constitution for the drama of Algeria, France now needs one for the crisis of adulthood.

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