The French political system

Anointed by popular vote

The respective roles of the President and Prime Minister were thus formed in the earliest years of the Fifth Republic, as a result of the paralysis of the entire French political class, at least until the Evian agreements granting Algerian independence in spring 1962. De Gaulle, taking advantage of the emotion caused by the attempt on his life at Petit-Clamart, then called a referendum, using a controversial procedure, to change the constitution and have the president elected in future by direct popular vote. A few weeks later, after the Assembly had overthrown the Pompidou government as a sign of hostility to this reform, he dissolved it and won the general election. The vote in autumn 1962 thus marks the birth of the “de facto majority”. With this majority behind him, de Gaulle kept Pompidou as Prime Minister. From that point on, the pre-eminence of the President was no longer disputed. De Gaulle’s re-election in 1965 was seen as a further approval of the system by the French people.

In practice, none of his successors challenged this institutional heritage, not even François Mitterrand, who, in 1964, had written a noted pamphlet calling the Gaullist regime a “permanent coup d’état”. Until 1986, each President used his election by popular vote and the parliamentary majority the French electorate systematically gave him in the general election to govern the country from the Élysée Palace. Foreign policy and defence were part of the President’s “reserved domain”, a phrase coined by Jacques Chaban-Delmas as early as 1959. The Prime Minister, chosen by the President, had merely to do “the Supply Corps work” (Charles de Gaulle).