What Makes a Country Ungovernable
France is pushing the limits of its Fifth Republic constitution.
Predictable though it was, the collapse of another French government this week was a momentous event. France is burning through prime ministers at an alarming rate: the new incumbent, Sébastien Lecornu, is the fifth in two years. Such instability is unprecedented under the current French constitution, which is predicated on strong executive authority. Some are comparing the current mess to the 1958 crisis that ended the ineffectual Fourth Republic, in which prime ministers lasted six months on average. One seasoned French analyst argued the situation is even worse now, as there is no leader like Charles de Gaulle in the offing to save the day.
How did we get here? The proximate cause was deadlock over the budget. France’s public finances are a mess: the deficit runs at 6% of GDP; public debt is 113%; interest costs exceed spending on education or defence—and are rising. On Monday, Prime Minister François Bayrou, a centrist who had been leading a minority government, called a confidence vote over plans to find savings. The far right and the left, which agree on nothing else, united to oust him—as they had done for Bayrou’s predecessor nine months earlier.
The episode points to a deeper shift that is severely testing France’s political order. Under the system set up in 1958, the president dominates and normally has a majority in the parliamentary assembly—either a conservative or a left-wing bloc. But since 2022, this bipolar dynamic has broken down. The National Assembly has been divided into three blocs (left, center right, and far right) that refuse to work with one another. As a result, every prime minister named by President Emmanuel Macron has struggled, relying on opposition divisions or constitutional mechanisms to pass laws without votes. Amid poisonous debates, meaningful reforms have been shelved as minority governments focus on mere survival—with little success. France isn’t just ungoverned; it seems ungovernable.
But why? Other countries are confronted with the rise of left-wing and right-wing radicals and yet muddle through without talk of regime change. Dire as its fiscal situation is, France still borrows on more favorable terms than Britain on international markets. Worse crises have been tackled successfully by Spain, Italy and Greece. Why is France uniquely unable to turn things around?
Most critics point the finger at President Macron. He is accused of ignoring the outcome of the inconclusive 2022 parliamentary elections and trying to run the country in his usual imperial style. Two years later, stymied by a hung parliament, he called a snap election. The gamble failed spectacularly, shrinking the parliamentary support for his camp and worsening the gridlock. The unpopular president continued to defy voters. He handpicked loyalist prime ministers—Lecornu being the latest—while giving them no room to negotiate with the opposition.
But this explanation is unconvincing on its own. The 2024 snap election was certainly a disaster that angered voters. But they had constantly attacked Macron for snubbing them, so he can hardly be vilified for asking the country to speak. And he had little choice but to go for centrist prime ministers: anyone from the far right or the left would have been toppled within days.
A wider cast of villains often blamed for the stalemate is the “classe politique.” In this account, parties are run by self-serving hacks who won’t work together to save the country. Populists at both extremes deny the need for fiscal restraint while clinging to simplistic solutions (soak the rich, squeeze immigrants); socialist leaders side with the hard left; conservative heavyweights remain on the sidelines rather than get their hands dirty. Governing centrists are not spared either, including prime ministers accused of rejecting meaningful negotiations. No wonder people want to throw the lot out. Political trust has hit rock bottom, with just 16% of voters expressing confidence in political parties, according to one survey. This chimes with popular sentiment aired in street protests this Wednesday and in the media daily. One woman told France Info that the public debt was not her problem: “Let the bastards sort it out.”
But there are problems with the “blame the politicians” reading of the ongoing impasse. France’s political class does offer a singularly unedifying spectacle—but it did not land from Mars to be foisted on a helpless populace. Elected officials fight among themselves because their voters do. And there’s something surreal about citizens accusing party leaders of obstruction—then angrily demonstrating with “block everything” as their rallying cry.
So is an irredeemably divided electorate at the root of the government’s paralysis? A comparison with Britain suggests this is not the whole story. The same anti-establishment grievances are heard on both sides of the Channel. On the right, the message centers on sovereignty, national values and curbing immigration. The radical left, meanwhile, makes similar demands in France and the UK: maintain benefits, tax wealth, bring corporations to heel; in foreign affairs, there is strident left-wing hostility to Israel. In Britain as in France, political trust is at an all-time low.
But in the UK discontent translates into a flailing government, with repeated scandals and calls for resignations. In other words, the country is experiencing a normal political crisis—not a challenge to the institutions themselves. No one is talking about tearing up the post-1688 parliamentary order.
If an overbearing president, irresponsible party apparatchiks, and voter polarization cannot by themselves explain France’s current predicament, what can? The missing piece of the puzzle is the institutions. The distinctive feature of the country’s political system is personal power. It is democratic in the sense that voters always have the final say, but the constitution is designed to place supreme authority in the presidency, with a prime minister nominally answerable to MPs as an adjunct.
In such a system—which, tellingly, no other democracy has copied—parliament is a subordinate force. Nobody aspiring to ultimately lead the country has any incentive to direct their MPs to support the government, much less to take a cabinet post themselves. This would mean owning the country’s problems and sinking their chances for the presidential election due in 2027.
As a result, the “présidentiables” (Édouard Philippe on the center right and the moderate socialist Raphaël Glucksmann, among others) sensibly wait in the wings until they get a chance to run for the top job. With the help of a pliable future assembly, they would then achieve the kind of omnipotence that Macron enjoyed during his first term, just like many presidents before him.
The odds of the new prime minister lasting any longer than his predecessors are therefore slim. There may be a glimmer of hope on passing a budget—something that must be done by the end of the year. Lecornu has signalled an openness to negotiate with the socialists, and Macron appears to have given him more leeway to do so. The challenge for Lecornu is to give them enough without losing support from the center right.
But even if he succeeds in this balancing act, surviving until the 2027 presidential election will be a tall order. The socialists want to reverse Macron’s controversial (but necessary) pension reforms that led to protests and strikes on a mass scale in 2023. The new government will continue to wrestle with competing pressure from voters and markets. Meanwhile, the parliamentary arithmetic hasn’t changed. Lecornu remains as vulnerable to a no-confidence vote as his two hapless predecessors.
His position might be all the more untenable as all parties (and even some within the “central bloc”) are calling for fresh elections as a way out of the crisis. But given the current system, which incentivizes going for broke, there is no obvious way to make France governable again. President Macron has no tricks up his sleeve to make it so. Calls for him to resign, too, will only grow louder.
Henri Astier is a London-based journalist who writes for French- and English-language publications. He writes the Substack Out of France.
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Does France suffer from the same disease as other democratic nations which have existed at peace with one another for the last half century? "Inventing the Enemy" is an essay written buy Umberto Eco in which he describes a conversation with the Pakistani cab driver who was taking Eco to an appointment in New York City. "Who is your enemy?" was the cab driver's question. The question was posed with regard to Italy, Eco's home country. "Well . . . we don't have any" was Eco's response. "Nonsense. Every country needs an enemy" opined the Pakistani philosopher. Eco reflected on the violent past of Italy's city states waging war on one another. In order to work in concert to achieve a larger goal, communities require an external threat that will animate and unify the members. Concepts like The War on Poverty, or The War on Drugs are not unifying. Trump's concept "The Enemy Within" is a unifying concept for a certain segment of American society. Perhaps France suffers from the same disease.
It seems that many if not most commentators bith inside and outside of France agree that the Fifth Republic, with its de facto elective monarchy rooted in a bespoke constitution written by and for General De Gaulle, has long outlasted its usefulness. It's almost a miracle it has survived the General by so long. I believe even Le Pen and Melanchon have both mused about replacing it with a parliamentary system. Is there any possibility of this actually happening in the foreseeable future?