The V Republic is dead. She had been seriously ill for years. And on March 16, President Emmanuel Macron gave him the coup de grace by approving the controversial pension reform by decree, without going through a vote in Parliament. In a minority in the National Assembly, Macron decided to squeeze his generous constitutional powers to the limit to impose his will, at the risk of seriously calling into question the democratic foundations of the regime established in 1958 by General de Gaulle. After this, there will be those who claim that the V Republic is still alive. But he is 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 proverbial political instability - there were twenty governments in eight years - ended with 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– that established a presidential regime unparalleled.
The objective was to guarantee the stability of the Government above all else, at the cost of cornering minorities –thanks to the double-round majority electoral system– and granting the head of state enormous prerogatives: the French president, far from being a figure representative or arbitral, it concentrates a large part of the executive power and has the power to appoint and dismiss the Government, as well as dissolve the National Assembly, at its discretion.
Elected directly by the citizens, he is not accountable to anyone else, not even to Parliament -which the most he can do is initiate a dismissal process in the event of a very serious breach of his obligations-, nor to the Justice -which can only prosecute him after leave the Élysée and never for the actions carried out based on his position–. In France the president is the one who has the last word. Like a republican sun king.
The system of the Fifth Republic, based on what has been dubbed "rationalized parliamentarism", has fulfilled the mission entrusted to it by De Gaulle. But at a high price: at the same time, it has opened a great gap between the power – cornered for decades by the Parisian or assimilated technocratic elites – and the citizens, who have become used to settling on the street, through demonstrations of force –often with violence–, the political struggle.
Not infrequently they have gotten away with it: one of the first reform projects of the pension system, promoted in 1995 by Alain Juppé, ended up being withdrawn. In 2006, the project to make employment contracts for young people more flexible, promoted by Dominique de Villepin, was repealed after having been approved and published in the official gazette! The yellow vests managed in 2019 to get the Macron government to reverse the new fuel rate...
It might seem that the current crisis over the pension reform –a very sensitive political issue, given the sensitivity of the French to all social cuts– is a new chapter in this dynamic of confrontation, from which negotiation and agreement are excluded. commitment. But today is something else. The French are not only protesting the increase in the retirement age from 62 to 64, but also the authoritarian method for its approval.
The whole process has been flawed. From the outset, the reform was processed as a bill to amend the financing of Social Security – that is, an alleged budgetary text – in order to apply an accelerated procedure in Parliament. An apparently minor matter but that could lead to the invalidation of the law by the Constitutional Council, which must rule on the 14th.
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 a vote of Parliament, which can only stop it – with little chance – by presenting a motion of censure against the Executive . The controversial item, equivalent to a swallow, has been used other times. Macron's own government, which in 2022 lost its majority in the Assembly – 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 carry out a law of this depth.
From his distant vantage point at the Élysée, Macron decided to roll over without calculating 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, alleging that he was elected with a program that included pension reform. It certainly was. But in this argument there are flagrant omissions: in the second round of the presidential elections last year, Macron obtained close to 60% of the votes; however, many were borrowed to stop his rival, the far-right Marine le Pen. Actually, in the first round he only got 27.8%. And his party, in the subsequent legislatures, was left with 27.5%. Little democratic legitimation seems.
Macron's desperate maneuver with pensions, his gesture of authority, has shown the definitive exhaustion of the system. The V Republic will take more or less time to give way to an eventual VI Republic. But the current one has already intoned its swan song.
