A dead man's confession about frauds and scams threatens to ruin Jospin, Chirac and the Fifth Republic itself

France doesn't work. This is no glib commentary on the 35-hour week, nor on an economy that is doing well, despite each and everyone seemingly heading for "the street" to pluck the fruits of its success. What has ceased to work is the French political system. That the Fifth Republic launched by General Charles de Gaulle is, to all intents, finished is illustrated every day by the poisonous non-relationship between Jacques Chirac, the president, and Lionel Jospin, the prime minister.

Leaving aside, for the moment, sinister videotapes and raging personal conflict, the idea behind the Fifth Republic is this: a strong president runs the country with a loyal prime minister of his choice behind him. That, clearly, is not the present case. A fall-back notion of how the Republic works is that a strong president and a prime minister from the opposite political side share in government. Clearly, that, too, is not the present case. What now?

"For three years, we have borne the entire weight of responsibility and action," says an exasperated Jospin, pointing to himself and his left-wing government. His aim in stressing the breakdown of power-sharing is to eclipse a conservative president who none the less figures in the constitution as the core of power. The French president, Jospin tartly observes, has become "the number one opponent" of the French government.

An astonishing recent fall in Jospin's popularity attests to who is running the country and who must therefore carry the can, but it does not suggest what can save the Republic's power structure. The structure is tinkered with, not redesigned, by the reduction of the presidential term from seven to five years in a surreal September referendum in which voter turnout was near invisible.

As with Tony Blair, Jospin's fortunes have been dramatically turned by the fuel price revolt, which originated, as was to be expected, in trucu-lent France before spreading Europe-wide. Ah, that proverbial week in politics. One moment, Jospin is on top of the world, with a roaring economy to his apparent credit, presiding over cuts in his country's over-blown taxes, glowing with a reputation for decency and rigour. The next moment, he is a donkey, misjudging the French, losing yards to Chirac and, worse, bespattered by sleaze.

Again like Blair, the French premier is "listening". Power, he admits, can isolate. But his popularity has sunk not because he gave in to special-interest agitators, which he did (French leaders are apt to do that sort of thing). Rather, it has sunk because he is perceived to have been mean about redistributing the tax taken from an overflowing treasury. On top of that, instead of calming tensions, as a president might be expected to do, Chirac has happily inflamed them. It was unbelievable, the president opined, that when economic growth was looking so good, purchasing power was standing still. (It was not, in fact, standing still, but people were ready to believe it was.)

Where the political structure falls down is in making no allowance for total rupture between president and prime minister. A detour here to videotapes. Jean-Claude Mery, who died last year, was a long-time secret fundraiser for the conservative RPR party, the neo-Gaullist movement that bore Chirac to the presidency. Mery's speciality was extracting bribes on public works contracts put out by the city of Paris, where Chirac was then mayor, and passing on those millions that he didn't cream off for himself to the RPR. Three years before his death from cancer, he videotaped a confession. Mery instructed the freelance journalist who filmed the confession, in the presence of a lawyer, not to release it unless he told him to, or until he died.

Recent reports in the newspaper Le Monde revealing the existence of this video, and thereafter Mery's ghostly appearance on national television screens - with the story that he had handed a huge amount of cash to a Chirac aide in the then mayor's presence - have destroyed any remaining pretence that Chirac and Jospin can share more than a mutual snarl. For it has long been the talk of Paris, as well as a matter of judicial investigation, that Chirac is likely to have had some small involvement, as mayor and RPR chief at the time, not only in the public works scams, but also in proven electoral fraud and the placing of RPR party workers in fictitious jobs on the municipal payroll. Everyone had been waiting for his successor as mayor, the luckless Jean Tiberi, to spill the beans in revenge for his rejection by the RPR as candidate to succeed himself in municipal elections next spring. In the end, however, it took a dead man to give insider substance to the charges.

Clearly, Chirac is wounded in this sorry bout of political necrophilia - even though the president cannot be taken to court while in office. Yet the Paris allegations have been stewing for so long that the shock of the video is as nothing compared to the revelation of who it was that assumed possession of the original Mery tape. He is none other than Jospin's former finance minister, Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

Well, well. Strauss-Kahn had to give up his top ministry last year over allegations of dubious personal bookkeeping. The same problem stopped him running for mayor of Paris, which was his aim. He was a brilliant minister and is sorely missed in Jospin's cabinet. He received the video, he acknowledges, from Mery's lawyer, who happened to be an old assistant of his. It also happened that the lawyer handed him this veritable anti-Chirac bomb just as the same lawyer was requesting a reduction in an £8m (F80m) bill for back taxes sent by Strauss-Kahn's ministry to his client Karl Lagerfeld, the couturier (the bill was subsequently cut by almost half). Strauss-Kahn contends that he never viewed the video and has lost it. The lawyer's "present", therefore, could not possibly have affected the Lagerfeld decision. The defence sounds so wondrously lame that it may even be true. But Chirac, an expert table-turner, can now almost plausibly reject the Mery saga as a conspiracy cooked up by Jospin's camp.

Still, the whole thing may not amount to much in the eyes of a jaded French public. Didn't all parties routinely resort to lawlessness to fund themselves?

Back, then, to a change of Republic. It is true that Wordsworth's blissful dawn normally requires a grand event: revolution (First Republic), renewed rejection of monarchy (Second), defeat by Prussia (Third), more war and the fall of Vichy (Fourth), hero's return (Fifth).

A repeat of any one of these does not seem remotely in prospect, but staggering events are not an absolute condition for moving on. Formal recognition by government and parliament that the current political system has broken down and needs a serious overhaul will be enough to launch the process of replacing it.

Only in one important, although intangible, sense does the September referendum change things. It modernises French democracy. Henceforth, the president is most unlikely to be able to hold on as excrutiatingly long as Francois Mitterrand did (14 years). But the change will not affect cohabitation, the cause of the current stand-off. What a five-year presidency will bring remains uncertain, because the next elections for president and parliament will now fall at more or less the same time, within weeks of each other in spring 2002.

First comes the general election. Some believe that victory for the left will, in its wake, push Jospin to the presidency or, similarly, that victory for the right will keep Chirac there. If either happens, France will be back on Fifth Republic track, line one. But only for five years. Others believe the French have so little faith in the political class that they will vote one way for parliament, the other for president, playing one off against the other. If that happens, however, France will not be back on line two, power-sharing, because no pair of op-ponents can have the patience to put up with a full five years of cohabitation.

France has to decide whether or not it needs a strong president. If it does, his or her power has to be guaranteed. That probably means moving towards the US presidential system, with parliament providing checks and balances and no prime minister as such. If not, then it is about time the president were put out of his ever-potential misery and demoted to a head of state, representative role, with parliament and the prime minister in unquestioned command.

Welcome, the Sixth Republic.

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