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French protesters rage at ‘stolen election’ as Macron picks conservative Barnier for PM
(www.france24.com)
this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2024
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Why is the President choosing the prime Minister?
Rather, what France's constitutional whatever that set that power structure up?
Here in [Commonwealth nation] we have a Governor General who officially accepts (as the Crown's representative) whichever coalition has majority in parliament as the new government and that government appoints their own prime Minister.
Not a lawyer but an informed citizen, I’d be happy to be corrected if I’m wrong.
That’s a spirit of the law vs letter of the law question which to my understanding has not been answered. I am no lawyer but the wording of our constitution is pretty ambiguous and leaves room to interpretation. I won't try and translate the article in question because as I said, not a lawyer and some blurred lines may be lost in my attempt at writing legalese in a foreign language.
It’s also useful to point out that this situation has never happened before. Yes the left coalition has the highest number of representatives, but there is little political room (as seen when the most radical parts of the coalition proposed not to participate directly in a would-be government) for expanding said coalition.
The constitution of the fifth republic was written in much different times, when De Gaulle wanted to avoid the fourth republic’s issues which was very parliamentary, but quite unstable. He wanted to be able to pick, and got this power when the constitution was written.
But we’ve reached this odd situation (no obvious majority because of the three-block-parliment) which was not really anticipated. So we’ll see how it goes, how long Barnier’s government will stand. As of now, the far right has given it’s blessing not to censor the government, making it a center-right-far right de facto coalition. But as of today, these are just words, so we're not sure what the exact terms of their agreement are. From what I know, the far right is not trying to participate in the current government, they would just abstain from participating in votes of no confidence, which would prevent such votes from having any effect, due to the current structure of parliament.
A party is also trying to impeach Macron which I think has never happened before in the 5th republic.
In France the president normally chooses the prime minister backed by a majority in the national assembly, otherwise the majority would do a vote of no-confidence and the president has to find a new prime minister. The current problem is that there's no majority.
The trick here is that nobody had the majority at the parliament. Which is quite unusual in France compared to let's say Belgium where spending over 6 month to build a coalition is the norm.
Macron and moderate right say they don't wanna work with leftist killing the hypothesis of left wing government that moderate right can remove at any time. However, if Barnier allies with Macron party, and get at least the passive support of far right, he has a majority. But basically the kind of majority that far right can remove at any time. Not sure what deal with Le Pen was negotiated
Here in [Commonwealth nation] we once had a governor general that refused a request by the Prime Minister to dissolve parliament and instead appointed someone ales as PM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%E2%80%93Byng_affair
Maybe some Commonwealth countries have made constitutional changes to avoid this from happening, but it's most certainly not universal thing that the GG has to accept the wishes of a coalition. In fact what is the mechanism for when there is not a coalition, which is common when there's a minority government in Canada? We kinda don't really do the coalition thing, we tend towards minority governments that take a "go ahead and vote no confidence, I dare you!" kinda thing.
Fascinating. TY for a fascinating slice of history.