The French Double Executive and the Experience of Cohabitation

Abstract

After the legislative election of March 1986, the French political system went through an unprecedented experiment that most Frenchmen called cohabitation. This new addition to the rich French political vocabulary refers to the major consequence of the 1986 election: the division and the sharing of governmental powers between a Socialist president of the Republic, Franqois Mitterrand, and a prime minister of the Right, Jacques Chirac, supported by a majority in the National Assembly. While such a situation had been expected to happen sometime in the course of the evolution of the French Fifth Republic, most analysts and some French politicians had argued that it could not possibly work such an experiment would bring about grave political controversies and would ultimately end in a constitutional crisis. Yet, cohabitation between President Mitterrand and Prime Minister Chirac avoided the severe problems that so many had predicted and lasted until the French presidential election of 1988. This article investigates the meaning of cohabitation, the reasons for its relative success, and its ultimate consequences in the present French political system. It presents four main points: the constitutional provisions responsible for cohabitation, the various theories and scenarios about cohabitation, the operation of cohabitation, and the present and future consequences of the experiment. The article concludes by discussing whether France is headed toward a system change.