Exactly half a century ago, at the start of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s presidency, political scientist Maurice Duverger published La Monarchie Républicaine, ou Comment les Démocraties se Donnent des Rois (“The Republican Monarchy, or How Democracies Give Themselves Kings,” 1974). In it, he described the evolution of the Fifth Republic toward a semi-presidential system, based since 1962 on the election of the president by universal suffrage and majority rule. Since then, the autocratic drift of presidential practice has confirmed his diagnosis.
The poisoned fruits of this drift have multiplied under Emmanuel Macron’s presidency. Like his predecessors, all of whom were elected in a form of fervent enthusiasm for the providential man, it wasn’t long before Macron too experienced the disgrace that inevitably follows a state of grace when everything is expected of the savior. This state of disgrace took particularly violent forms against him, due to the expectations that the promise of the “new world” had raised among the French. And we question a presidential practice perceived, rightly or wrongly, as authoritarian and out of touch with French expectations.
Against the backdrop of a fractured and restless society, Macron-bashing appears to be a rejection of the “republican monarchy.” The paradox is that, in this system designed by General Charles de Gaulle around presidential pre-eminence, the president, because he believed himself to be all-powerful, is now weaker than ever.
Change the Republic?
The current political crisis is a glaring illustration of this paradox. The Jupiterian president [as Macron referred to himself before his first election in 2017] is now seen as the main culprit behind the political chaos, having misused the constitutional tool of dissolution. After that, the political sequence devoted to the search for a new prime minister once again drew criticism of the monarchical nature of the presidential approach.
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