Think back to when Richard Nixon resigned as US president. To when Harold Wilson was back in Downing Street for a second term. To when Margaret Thatcher wasn’t remotely viewed as a future prime minister. In France, a certain Jacques Chirac was already in place as prime minister. As president more than a quarter of a century later, and nearing the end of a seven-year term, he is now seeking re-election for the sole apparent reason, bless him, that he cannot conceive of not being there.
This does not bespeak a vital democracy. It recalls the sort of political longevity reserved in Britain for backbenchers from the shires or the pitheads who aren’t expected to run the country. Or in America, for white-maned southern senators who roar without pretending to chart the country’s destiny. France has – or had – a different view. The destiny of experienced leaders is to continue in the political front line until they drop.
But French voters aren’t entirely inured to this. They saw that they were giving themselves a president with too much power, and too long to exercise it, if they elected parliaments that ate out of his hand. So they tried electing parliaments with majorities that opposed the president’s party. What nicer balance? A strong prime minister – at present the confident Socialist Lionel Jospin – to direct the nation’s affairs for a limited time, working under a decision-making president with different political goals and endless years to pursue them. Both could be relied upon to keep the other in order.
Cohabitation is cruelly ambiguous, though. It asks too much of the system (a constitution expressly written for the authoritarian Charles de Gaulle) and of human tolerance. The result of the current, longest-ever bout of cohabitation is that President Chirac has been able to retain precious little power beyond the artificial glory of topping Jospin in the popularity polls. This makes a mockery of the grand task of political steering that the president is there to do. The constitution lies buckled.
With a presidential election looming in 2002, and Chirac and Jospin squaring up for it with increasing venom, a shocking question occurs to the French. What is the relevance of the job these men are fighting for? Is this the most powerful post in Europe – or the most humiliating?
Chirac was a political monarch until just two years into his presidency. Then he tossed away his power by dissolving parliament on a whim – a gamble that went disastrously wrong. The left-wing opposition under Jospin, unable to believe its luck, waltzed into power with a runaway majority. The power to dissolve parliament is a president’s ultimate asset. When it is squandered, his political capital is grievously depleted.
In Chirac’s case, cohabitation has turned from foul nuisance to foul indignity. A Chirac biography just out, ironically entitled Miracle Man, points up his weakness: he has held on to personal popularity but induces neither fear nor respect.
But this isn’t a question of saving Chirac. It is a matter of saving the presidency. And the solution has blown in like a whirlwind that nothing can apparently resist. Simple. Reduce the presidential term from seven years to five. No more 14-year reigns stretching over consecutive seven-year terms of the kind Francois Mitterrand enjoyed at the expense of France’s democratic sanity, not to mention the probity of its public life. Apart from passing the democracy test, five years would make the presidential term the same as the regular life of a parliament, so that the perils of cohabitation would fade – assuming, that is, that voters backed a president and a parliamentary majority from the same side in separate elections only a few weeks apart. Thus would the president be assured of holding the political reins.
Almost everyone on both the left and the right supports a shift to the quinquennat, including an instantly converted Chirac. Only last summer, he was saying with notable firmness: “A five-year presidency in any form would be a mistake and I will not accept it.” This maintained the habit that French presidents invariably adopt, after they are safely elected, of dropping all talk of a shortened term. But now Chirac is making a virtue of being open-minded. It has clearly dawned on him, as it has to his aides, that he stands a much better chance of re-election for five years than he does for the seven that would extend his stay to 14 years in the Elysee Palace. Age opens his mind further. He will be 70 when the election is held.
Despite its whirlwind arrival, the quinquennat is no sudden brainwave. It is more a dinosaur’s egg left around waiting for someone to hatch. The obliging tyrannosaurus rex is Valery Giscard D’Estaing, the French president of the 1970s who failed to attract enough votes to take him beyond a single seven-year term. Who is more fitting than this frustrated conservative grandee to dust off the egg and hurl it into the political arena?
To do something about the presidential term has required some rethinking for Giscard, a career-long foe of Chirac. A reduction to five years was, as it happened, on the verge of becoming law just before he took office in 1974 – and he never sought to apply the principle to himself. That said, his initiative has been a huge success. From all except conservative diehards, the response is “Let’s do it, fast”.
Amazingly, considering the usual pace of French constitutional reform, it is quite likely that there will be a referendum before the year ends. Opinion polls show the public in favour by a large majority.
It was a reform crying out to be made. Had it been done when the time was first ripe in the early 1970s, when Nixon was listening to unhappy tapes and Wilson was eyeing technology’s white heat, then France would have avoided a series of political stalemates that have held it back.
Moreover, there’s nothing sacred about seven years in French political culture. Its main claim to fame is that it is easily the longest elective term for a leader in any modern democracy. It came about by chance in 1873, when the Third Republic, which tottered forth from imperial France’s defeat by Prussia, elected its first president, Marshal Marie Edme de MacMahon. A royalist majority in parliament randomly allotted the intransigent soldier seven years, in the vain hope that this would prove to be a sufficient interval to permit a return of the monarchy.
All that now seems to stand in the way of five years (once renewable) is tactical jousting between Chirac and Jospin, each of whom would like to claim paternity for a reform that will recharge the political scene, not least the spirit of their upcoming contest.
Chirac, who completed five years in office this month and is hell-bent, for all his spiritual conversion, on finishing the seven for which he was elected, is concerned that the change will pressure him into resigning early. Jospin wants to be seen as the modern democrat who pulled France out of its creaking political trap.
A ritual argument, indeed the only argument, that has been heard against five years is that it will move France to the American presidential system, in which the president heads a government whose ministers don’t hail from parliament. The balance-of-power division between president and parliament is distinct. Not everyone in France likes the look of this.
Yet the likeliest outcome of a five-year presidency is the restoration of a very powerful president indeed, with more authority than Britain’s prime minister or a German chancellor. The idea is to end the debilitating confusion of cohabitation and to have a president who lords it over a parliament elected in his political image.
The big advantage is that the next winner (not, mercifully, Chirac) would not be at it for nearly as long.
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