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E Pouv 163 0005 PDF
E Pouv 163 0005 PDF
Pascal Jan
In Pouvoirs Volume 163, Issue 4, 2017, pages 5 to 16
Translated and edited by Cadenza Academic Translations
Translator: Emma Mandley, Editor: Faye East, Senior Editor: Mark Mellor
ISSN 0152-0768
ISBN 9782021372731
P O L I T I C A L PA R T I E S I N F R A N C E ’ S
FIFTH REPUBLIC
Th e r e g i m e o f t h e pa r t i e s i s d e a d ,
l o n g l i v e p r e s i d e n t i a l i s t pa r t i e s !
The lure of the presidential election, coupled with the need for the
president to obtain a parliamentary majority, is deeply disruptive to
the traditional party system, to the extent that the famous “regime
of the parties,” denounced so often by General de Gaulle, has been
thrown to the winds. 3 While the parties associated with parliamentary
1. Hans Kelsen, The Essence and Value of Democracy, trans. Brian Graf (Plymouth, UK:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2013) [La Démocratie. Sa nature, sa valeur, trans. Charles Eisenmann.
(Paris: Economica, 1988).]
2. Unless otherwise stated, all translations of cited material are our own.
3. In a televised interview with Michel Droit between the two rounds of the 1965 presi-
dential election, General de Gaulle said: “I proposed the 1958 Constitution to the country
P O L I T I C A L P A R T I E S I N F R A N C E ’ S F I F T H R E P U B L I C
A presidential strategy
The procedures for the 1958 presidential election, followed by those
decided as a result of the 1962 referendum, were intended to reinforce
presidential autonomy and, by relying on plebiscite, to prevent parties
from creating a barrier between candidates and the voting public. The
election of president by direct universal suffrage followed on from de
Gaulle’s interpretation of the referendum as a way of overriding political
divides. Yet since the 1965 presidential election, political groupings have
again bounced back into the electoral landscape. L’Union pour la nou-
velle République [The Union for the New Republic] supported General
de Gaulle between the two rounds, while the Fédération de la gauche
[…] with the intention of putting an end to the regime of the parties. It was in this spirit that
the Constitution was created.” And he added: “We created confessionals to try and repulse
the devil, but if the devil is in the confessional, that changes everything.”
4. Jean-Claude Colliard, “Le système de partis ou la Constitution politique de la
Ve République,” Revue du droit public et de la science politique en France et à l’étranger 5-6
(1998): 1611.
P A S C A L J A N
5. Pierre Avril, Essais sur les partis politiques (Paris: LGDJ, 1990), 212
P O L I T I C A L P A R T I E S I N F R A N C E ’ S F I F T H R E P U B L I C
The search for the right candidate is so obsessive that the parties have
no hesitation in depriving their executives or their party activists of the
nomination and conferring it instead on supporters whose political
pedigree cannot be guaranteed. For the least representative parties, or
newly formed political movements, the presidential election represents an
invaluable test bed for advancing their candidate’s access to the position
of challenger, a fortuitous platform from which to try and disrupt the
party-political game, and an ideal competition in which to promote their
ideas. From this point of view, the presidential election is very valuable to
small and newly formed political groups, and even to completely marginal
parties so long as their candidates surmount the obstacle of selection
by local elected representatives. With their conspicuity assured, these
political groups can hope to draw in a significant number of voters in the
parliamentary elections, which since 2002 have followed on the heels of V
the presidential election. They will thus profit from the financial benefit
granted to candidates put up by parties that obtain at least one percent
of votes in at least fifty constituencies (in 2017 each vote commands
€1.42 per annum for the duration of the legislature). This fact explains
the proliferation of candidates at parliamentary elections (in 2017 the
average for each constituency was fourteen). If they fail to be compet-
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from its support. It can even mean the party’s decline in the event of
repeated defeats and if no alliance with a political party is formed in
preparation for parliamentary elections. L’Union pour la démocratie
française [The Union for French Democracy] foundered because of its
inability to unite behind its candidates; the Socialist Party is in a state of
near collapse in 2017 because of its ideological and strategic divisions;
while the Democratic Movement has had a new beginning as a result
of its alliance with the presidential party, La République En Marche!
Nationally, the Communist Party is stagnating because of its repeated
failure to present a candidate from within its ranks and this is having an
impact on its local operations, which are vastly diminished, and on the
loyalty of its voters, which is inexorably crumbling away. While on the
one hand the open primaries distance the party machinery from the choice
VI of candidates, on the other they reinforce the presidentialist strategy.
The emergence of new political movements such as En Marche! and La
France Insoumise demonstrates the persistent lure of the presidential
election, since these two groups were created first and foremost for the
purpose of achieving power at a national level. They were consequently
set up with a remarkable vertical decision-making structure: there is no
competition for the candidate at the presidential elections and the choice
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T h e d e b i l i t y o f p o l i t i c a l pa r t i e s
For many years, traditional political parties have been out of favor with
the people, who reject them despite becoming increasingly engaged in
society’s many different causes. Party activism is flagging, membership
is plummeting. The parties are viewed by the younger generation not as
movements but as brands to which they may subscribe for a while but
which they abandon without a backward glance. Any loyalty to a party
is superficial. But the crisis is not simply one of finance and activism.
It is connected to an excessive recourse to the law to resolve internal
political conflicts and perhaps still more to the organization of open
P O L I T I C A L P A R T I E S I N F R A N C E ’ S F I F T H R E P U B L I C
primaries, which are destructive to the very unity of the groups that
have fallen for the apparent charms of so-called participative democracy.
6. Jean-Jacques Urvoas. 2015. Speech at the conference “Le droit interne des partis politiques”
[The Law within Political Parties] hosted by the Association française de droit constitutionnel
[French Association for Constitutional Law], Paris, September 30.
P O L I T I C A L P A R T I E S I N F R A N C E ’ S F I F T H R E P U B L I C
7. Conseil d’État, October 30, 1996, no. 177927 “Élections municipales de Fos-sur-Mer.”
8. Cour de Cassation, Première chambre civile, January 25, 2017 “Front National v. Jean-
Marie le Pen.”
9. Jean-Pierre Camby, “Les partis peuvent-ils avoir un juge?” in Le droit interne des partis
politiques, ed. Julie Benetti, Anne Levade and Dominique Rousseau. (Paris: Mare & Martin,
2017), 129.
10. Conseil d’État, June 2, 2017, no. 411015.
P A S C A L J A N
A B S T R A C T
Lacking specific legal status, French political parties are experiencing a major
crisis, as dramatically revealed by the presidential and parliamentary elections
in May and June 2017, as well as by the growing recourse to the law in their
internal functioning. Yet the new political movements, like the endangered
traditional parties, are just as president-centered in their strategy as in their
organization.
Pascal Jan is a specialist in public law and senior lecturer at the Bordeaux
Institute of Political Studies. An authority on France’s Fifth Republic,
he recently published La République gouvernée (1958-2017), the third
and final volume of Constitutions de la France (Paris: LGDJ 2016-2017).