France’s prime ministerial charade
This week President Emmanuel Macron appointed a new prime minister in a bid to revive his flagging authority. Having failed to win an absolute majority in parliamentary elections in 2022, he has increasingly looked like a lame duck.
Last year the centrist president struggled to secure minor tweaks to France’s unsustainable pension system; his immigration reform squeaked through only after being hijacked by conservatives.
Macron’s new prime minister, Gabriel Attal, is a former education minister who is popular with Macron’s middle-of-the-road core electorate. At 34, he is France’s youngest head of government of the modern era. He is also openly gay — another first — and social-media savvy.
As many commentators have remarked, the appointment is a bold move to rejuvenate French politics. But few have noted that the change of prime minister has rested on a hackneyed lie at the heart of the Fifth Republic.
Under the letter of the 1958 Constitution, the prime minister is appointed by the president but answerable only to Parliament. Once in office, he or she may resign if they lose the confidence of a majority of MPs or of their own accord, but not on Elysian orders. Article 8 of the constitution is clear on this: the president of the republic “brings the functions [of the prime minister] to an end when the latter submits the resignation of the government”.
In practice, all French presidents have fired their prime ministers at will. In the 1960s General de Gaulle required PM Georges Pompidou to a sign a resignation letter in advance; Pompidou did likewise with his own appointees after succeeding de Gaulle in the top job.
It is not clear whether recent presidents have resorted to such a ploy. In truth, it is not necessary. French prime ministers know their place. This was certainly the case for the previous incumbent, Élisabeth Borne. Pundits write that she “tendered her resignation”, but everyone knows that she stood down when asked to do so by Macron.
One might regard the resignation charade as a harmless ritual, equivalent to British crown officers having the door of Parliament ceremonially slammed in their faces. There is a key difference, however. The choreography of prime ministerial replacements is not meant to highlight where the real power lies, but to obfuscate it.
No analyst has exposed the hypocrisy and illiberal nature of French institutions more trenchantly than the late Jean-François Revel. In his 1992 essay L’Absolutisme inefficace (“ineffective absolutism”), Revel shows that the presidency is much too powerful for its own good.
The pretence of spontaneous resignation is designed to perpetuate the myth of France’s hybrid executive. On paper, an elected head of state shares power with a PM who is backed by parliament and chooses his cabinet. But the subservience of prime ministers has always been glaring.
Not only are they sackable on a presidential whim: they also are denied their constitutional right to name their team. In the 1980s François Mitterrand’s first PM, Pierre Mauroy, complained that he had chosen just one of his ministers. No commentator has pretended that Attal has had a say in any of the major appointments in his government.
The surprise choice of Rachida Dati, a divisive conservative, as culture minister is universally interpreted as a sign of Macron’s irritation with France’s woke entertainment industries.
PMs are both servants and scapegoats. Analysts often refer to them as “fuses”: who can be discarded to protect the president when things go wrong. This makes a mockery of democratic accountability. “The person held responsible is not the one who gives the orders, but the one who receives them,” Revel wrote. The French prime minister’s office, he concludes, “is not a function, but a fiction.”
The main point of L’Absolutisme inefficace is that France’s presidency is both imperial and impotent. This is not as paradoxical as it may sound. It is a truism in political science that checks and balances carry more authority than autocracy. In a system where all the decisions are made by one person, that figure gets blamed whenever anything goes wrong.
France’s despotic ancien régime was notoriously powerless to effect change. The country’s struggle to push through significant reforms in recent decades is rooted in the fundamental fragility of rule by a single — albeit democratically elected — leader.
Regardless of his undoubted political talent, Macron is hemmed in by a system that both elevates and neuters him. Changing prime ministers only highlights the absolutist logic of France’s presidency. One day Attal might in turn be called upon to “submit his resignation”. But he is sure to realise his menial status long before them.
