De Gaulle’s Republic

To understand this development, we must go back to the beginnings of the regime that Charles de Gaulle set out to establish. In 1958, de Gaulle was entrusted with finding a solution to the colonial war in Algeria that had begun four years earlier. The postwar Fourth Republic was overwhelmed by this conflict, and its leaders agreed to place the country’s fate in the hands of the “most illustrious of Frenchmen” under the threat of military sedition.

De Gaulle’s return to power in a legalized coup enabled him to lay the foundations for a new balance between the country’s institutions, its political economy, and its role on the world stage. We can summarize its main points as follows: the primacy and autonomy of the executive over the state’s legislative arm; a promise of economic modernization with (relatively) shared benefits; and a policy of “grandeur” on the international stage, despite the end of the colonial era.

As the cornerstone of this regime, the president of the Republic could count on a strong state that built up a nuclear arsenal, launched major industrial projects, urbanized France, and transformed its economy. While this transformation did not occur without controversy, French households generally saw their standard of living rise and found a form of “collective reassurance” in the special place that France claimed to occupy in the Atlantic alliance.

From this perspective, a certain unity characterizes the presidencies of de Gaulle (1958–69), Georges Pompidou (1969–74), and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (1974–81). Over time, political life then became increasingly bipolar, with parties of the Right and Left forming alliances to the detriment of the centrist forces that had previously been essential for building majorities. Yet throughout this period, it was the Right that monopolized national power.

Second Era

A second era of the Fifth Republic began in 1981. Politically, this was the year that saw François Mitterrand and his Socialist Party come to power. Although it resulted in new rights and social gains, this novel ruling majority failed to open up a third way between a struggling capitalist model on the one hand, which the neoliberal offensive was preparing to radicalize at the expense of workers, and the failure of authoritarian bureaucracies in the East on the other.

Over the course of three decades, the initial coherence of the system slowly began to unravel. The revival of European integration through the European single market and currency union contributed (along with other factors) to the decline of the interventionist state. The great movement to reduce social inequalities slowed down, with low-income earners and younger generations paying the price. On the world stage, France’s relative decline, increasingly reduced to the status of a middle power, was confirmed.

This means that there were no longer as many tangible results to offset the executive’s capture of power as there had been in the past. In a sign of latent popular dissatisfaction, the socialist left and the post-Gaullist right continued to swap places in power at every national election, whether presidential or parliamentary. As a result, a previously unprecedented situation has now arisen on several occasions: cohabitation between a head of state and a head of government with different political affiliations.

However, each camp was still able to command an exclusive parliamentary majority without needing to share power. In 2000, politicians even amended the law and the constitution to ensure that the presidential term and the legislative one would coincide. This was a way to forcibly prolong presidential domination at the expense of parliamentary authority and the participation of citizens.

The result was the increasing fragility of the two major governing parties — Les Républicains on the Right and the Socialist Party on the Left — which were ultimately both ousted from national power for the first time in 2017.

Macronism

With the transformation of the party system, a third era of the Fifth Republic began under the rule of Emmanuel Macron. We could describe him as a maverick in the political system, who nevertheless rubbed shoulders with the country’s administrative, financial, and governmental elites.

By combining center-right and center-left political approaches that were compatible with neoliberalism, Macron created the equivalent of a grand coalition such as we have seen in other European states. Yet this French-style “grand coalition” came under the patronage of a republican monarch, whose mantle the president eagerly donned.

The continued modernization of French society against its will has generated social movements without precedent in terms of scale and duration. Macron did manage to win a second term in 2022, after an apathetic campaign conducted in the wake of the pandemic and at the very beginning of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. However, the subsequent legislative elections deprived his allies of an absolute majority — the first time since the elections were synchronized in the early 2000s that the president’s party suffered this fate. The position of Macron’s camp worsened further after the dissolution of the National Assembly in the summer of 2024.

Beyond the boundaries of Macronism, whose ideological compass has increasingly veered to the right in order to retain power, the entire political scene is sinking into confusion. This is not merely because the actors must adapt to a situation that has not been seen over the past six decades. It is also because the provisions of the constitution offer no assistance to those actors in the search for stable and legitimate governmental formulas.

There are currently three poles that structure political competition in France: the radical, nativist right, dominated by the Rassemblement National (RN) of Marine Le Pen; the presidential camp, initially defined by its attachment to neoliberalism; and the Left, which has been trying to develop a synthesis between the goals of defending the French welfare state, launching an ecological transition, and pressing for the democratization of the regime. In the electoral arena, it is highly unlikely that any of these poles will be strong enough to govern alone, even with the current voting system (and even if this would be desirable).

The lack of proportional representation discourages cooperation between those poles in the parliamentary area, as does the possibility of a winner-take-all victory in the next presidential election. Hence the current deadlock, which makes French democracy one of the most unstable political systems in the EU at present.

A Sixth Republic?

This third age of the Fifth Republic is still in the process of revealing its main characteristics. The collective sense of powerlessness evident today is all the more alarming for a large EU member state such as France in light of a rapidly changing global scene, with revisionist powers like Russia and China flanked by Donald Trump’s wrecking-ball approach to the established international order. The new US administration is not content with simply “abandoning” Europe but is positioning itself as an adversary of its liberal political model.

There is an enormous challenge for republican forces in France, both on the Left and in what remains of the center right. The RN and its allies, unblemished by any exercise of power, are proposing a clear solution to the crisis of the regime, which all the major powers with an interest in destabilizing Europe will be happy to support. This solution aims to unite the nation on a narrow, exclusionary basis, at the expense of all minorities who do not conform to an intolerant conception of French identity.

Of course, the scope of those targeted is likely to widen as the ineffectiveness of these immoral remedies becomes apparent. Under the pretext of national independence, this nativist and authoritarian solution will lead to a bleak future of vassalage to neo-imperial states that share spheres of influence.

The alternative would be a Sixth Republic, based on a reduction in the powers of the presidency, an assembly elected through proportional representation and endowed with greater resources, and increased opportunities for the intervention of citizens in decision-making processes.

But an institutional solution will not be enough. While the Fifth Republic initially found a sense of coherence through the promise of modernization, progressive republicans must now strive to build social and ecological protections in the face of contemporary vulnerabilities, and to reinvent France’s role in defending Europe and its most universal values.