France Profile 2007: Government

Posted February 7th, 2008 by bigGuy

Government

Government

Political System Overview

The French Republic, known as the Fifth Republic, has a hybrid form of government with elements of both presidential and parliamentary systems. The French system features a prime minister and a president who are both active participants in the day-today functioning of government. The system differs from a typical parliamentary system in that it has a popularly elected president who is not a ceremonial figurehead, and it differs from a presidential system in that it has an executive prime minister who has some answerability to the legislature. France’s current institutions are governed by the constitution of the Fifth Republic, which was approved by popular referendum in 1958. This constitution significantly strengthened the power of the executive authorities (the president and the government) and curtailed the authority of the legislature. Prior to 1958, France had a weak executive and suffered from government instability; during the Fourth Republic’s 12-year existence, there were 26 different governments.

Executive Branch

Under the system forged by Charles de Gaulle, which remains largely in place, France has a strong, stable executive at the center of power. The French constitution gives executive authority to both the president and the prime minister. The president, who presides from the Elysée Palace, is the official head of state and commander in chief of the armed forces.

The president is elected by direct universal suffrage to a five-year term of office, a term shortened by two years in 2002. The president is not term-limited. The prime minister, the head of government, is nominated by the National Assembly, the legislature’s lower house, and appointed by the president. The prime minister leads the Council of Ministers or cabinet, whose members are not necessarily parliamentarians. The president appoints the cabinet on the recommendation of the prime minister. According to the power division that has evolved as a politcal convention, the president is mainly responsible for foreign policy and national defense and the prime minister for domestic policy. The governing process can be complicated in periods of so-called “cohabitation,” in which the prime minister and president, who are elected separately, are from rival parties.

One of the president’s most important powers is the right to dissolve the National Assembly and call new legislative elections. The president is also authorized to submit certain policy matters, e.g., European Union treaties, to national referenda. The prime minister retains significant authority as the leader of the majority party or coalition in the National Assembly. The balance of power between the president and prime minister depends on which party holds sway in the legislature. When the president has the strong support of a parliamentary majority, the prime minister tends to serve as a deputy of the president. When the president’s party is in the minority, the president still appoints a prime minister from a party in the majority coalition. This results in a power-sharing arrangement⎯cohabitation⎯in which the president and prime minister tend to check each other’s influence. The first episode of cohabitation occurred under Socialist president François Mitterrand, from 1986 to 1988, after the Socialist Party lost its majority in the National Assembly. In 1997 President Jacques Chirac lost his conservative majority in the National Assembly, leading to a period of cohabitation with Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin.

Legislative Branch

France has a bicameral legislature, with a National Assembly of 577 members and a Senate of 321 members (296 for metropolitan France, 13 for overseas departments and territories, and 12 for French nationals abroad). Under a 2003 law, to reflect demographic changes, the number of senators will increase to 346 by 2010.

Members (deputies) of the National Assembly, the principal legislative body, are directly elected to five-year terms in single-member electoral constituencies by a two-ballot system; all seats are voted on in each election. Senators, whose term was shortened from nine to six years in 2004, are elected indirectly through an electoral college consisting of elected officials in each department (roughly, state). The system introduces a rural, conservative bias in the composition of the Senate. However, the Senate’s legislative powers are in practice limited. When the two houses of the legislature disagree, the final decision rests with the National Assembly.

Under the constitution of the Fifth Republic, the legislature’s powers were reduced compared to those existing under the Fourth Republic. The agenda of the legislature is strongly influenced by the government, which can demand an up-or-down vote on legislation or even win its adoption without an actual vote. The president can dissolve the National Assembly before the end of its five-year term, as has happened five times since the inauguration of the Fifth Republic. At the same time, despite its diminished powers, the National Assembly can cause the government to fall if an absolute majority of the total Assembly membership votes to censure.

Judicial Branch

The most distinctive feature of the French judicial system is that it has two main branches, each with a hierarchy of appellate courts. One branch⎯the administrative order of courts⎯hears administrative cases (litigation involving disputes over government regulations or against public bodies). Another branch⎯the judicial or ordinary order of courts⎯hears civil and criminal cases.

Most cases involving administrative bodies or rules are heard initially by administrative tribunals. Appeals of decisions can move up through a series of courts, at the apex of which is the Council of State, a tribunal founded by Napoléon Bonaparte. The Council of State, which sits in the Palais Royal, is the final court of appeal on the legality of administrative acts or executive decisions. The council has the power to quash governmental decisions and regulations if they do not conform to applicable constitutional or statutory law, or to general principles of French law.

In the judicial or ordinary order of courts, the lower courts are of two main types, the civil courts and the criminal courts. The civil courts judge conflicts between persons or between persons and corporations. The criminal courts judge minor legal infractions (contraventions) and graver offenses (délits). Felonies are tried in assize courts (cours d’assises), the only courts with trial by jury. From the lower civil and criminal courts alike, appeals may be taken to appeals courts (cours d’appel), of which there were 27 in 2003. Judgments of the appeals courts and the assize courts are final, except that appeals on the interpretation of the law or points of procedure may be taken to the highest of the judicial courts, the Court of Cassation or the Supreme Court of Appeals in Paris.

Several specialized courts also exist. In the ordinary order of courts are, for example, commercial courts, industrial courts, and social security courts. In addition, there are high courts empowered to try crimes of a political nature by the president or misconduct by members of the government.

Administrative Divisions

Traditionally a strongly centralized state, France had two levels of subnational government dating back to the French Revolution, municipalities and departments. Each of the departments was headed by a prefect appointed by the central government. Since the mid-1980s, France has been decentralizing authority, creating a third, regional level of administration and providing for the first time for the direct election of regional councils. The three levels of administration now include 36,763 municipalities (communes), 100 departments, and 26 regions. The regions, which often roughly correspond to France’s prerevolutionary provinces, group the departments and have jurisdiction over planning, development, vocational training and upper secondary educational institutions (lycées). The departments⎯96 in metropolitan France and four overseas (Martinique, Guadeloupe, Réunion, and French Guiana)⎯have authority over health care, social entitlements, and lower secondary education (collèges). Each department has both a prefect and an elected assembly. Each municipality has an elected council and a mayor. The mayor is elected locally but also represents the French state.

Judicial and Legal System

France has a system of civil law, which, in the tradition of coded Roman law, calls for applying statutes as written, rather than relying on case law and legal precedent. The legal system is a descendant of an extensive collection of laws drafted under the direction of Napoléon Bonaparte, the Code Napoléon. Current legislation must conform to the Constitution of the Fifth Republic of 1958 and to treaties, for example, the European Convention on Human Rights (accepted by treaty).

France’s Constitutional Council, a new body established by the 1958 constitution, is the country’s forum for constitutional review of legislation. Constitutional challenges may be raised to legislation during the period between its passage and promulgation (signature of the president). Such challenges may be brought by the president, the prime minister, the president of the Senate, the president of the National Assembly, 60 senators, or 60 deputies. Once promulgated, French legislation is not subject to judicial review. In recent years, challenges have been raised to aspects of France’s antiterrorism legislation.

The core of the legal system is a body of civil servants, the magistrates. Trained and selected at the national school for magistrates, the magistrates are mainly of two groups, judges (and assisting lawyers) and prosecutors. Judges, although civil servants, enjoy special statutory protection from the executive. They may not be transferred without their consent. Their careers are overseen by the High Council of the Magistracy. Prosecutors, on the other hand, respond to the minister of justice in the executive branch. This organizational position of prosecutors regularly arouses the suspicion that they have been pressured to drop litigation against politicians suspected of corruption. Legal tradition since the Napoléonic era has always given prosecutors strong powers. In 2004 the National Assembly passed a sweeping anticrime law that decreased the powers of judges and further augmented those of prosecutors, whose job is to convict, as well as the powers of the police. The controversial law’s hundreds of revisions to the penal code enhanced police and prosecutorial powers to conduct surveillance and to detain and question suspects without charges and legal counsel.

The exceptional powers for the police and prosecutors under the law are said to be aimed not at common crime but at organized criminal activities related to drug trafficking, terrorism, assassination, pimping, money laundering, illegal immigration, and torture. The new law has been seen as a political move on the part of the center-right to neutralize the far-right National Front party of Jean-Marie Le Pen, which takes a hard line on crime.

Notwithstanding the growing stringency of France’s penal system and code, the death penalty, abolished in 1981, is not among the sentencing options that mainstream politicians contemplate.

Electoral System

Suffrage in France, extended to women in 1944, is now universal at age 18. The country has a two-round voting system for the National Assembly and president. Runoff elections are required if no candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round. The most recent presidential election was held in April and May 2007. As no candidate obtained an absolute majority in the first round in April, a runoff round between the two leading candidates, Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal, took place on Sunday, May 6. Presidential elections are followed in June by an election for deputies of the National Assembly.

As a requirement of European Union (EU) membership, the French parliament approved a constitutional amendment allowing citizens of EU member countries who are residents in France to vote in elections for seats on France’s municipal councils. The same group may also vote to fill France’s seats in the European Parliament, the representative assembly of the EU. Citizens of any EU country can be elected to a French municipal council or to a French seat in the European Parliament, but they may not serve as mayors.

Politics and Political Parties

For the past 25 years, France’s government has alternated between two relatively stable party coalitions. On the left is a coalition led by the French Socialist Party (Parti Socialiste—PS) and including minor members such as the French Communist Party (Parti Communiste Français—PCF), The Greens (Les Verts), and the Left Radical Party (Parti Radical de Gauche—PRG). On the center-right is the current ruling coalition led by the Union for a Popular Movement (Union pour un Mouvement Populaire— UMP)⎯called Union for a Presidential Majority when first formed in 2002. The UMP was formed from a merger of the main center-right party, Rally for the Republic (Rassemblement pour la République—RPR), and a minor partner, the bulk of the Union for Democracy (Union pour la Démocratie Française—UDF), as well as the small Liberal Democracy (Démocratie Libérale—DL) party.

Other minor parties have some representatives, for example, Rally for France and the Independence of Europe (Rassemblement pour la France et l'Indépendance de l'Europe—RpFIE) and Citizen and Republican Movement (Mouvement Républicain et Citoyen—MRC). However, it is difficult for parties outside the major coalitions to make significant electoral inroads. Despite these difficulties, the far-right National Front (Front National—FN) has periodically had sizable successes in elections since 1983. In the mid-1980s, because the incentives of France’s twoballot electoral system favor inter-party alliances, the mainstream center-right parties flirted with a strategic alliance with the FN, but finally rejected it. Instead, the moderate right co-opted the FN’s positions by taking a harder line on immigration and law and order.

Prominent figures of the center-right parties at present are President Nicolas Sarkozy, Prime Minister François Fillon, and several government ministers, Jean-Louis Borloo (economics), Alain Juppé (environment), and Michèle Alliot-Marie (interior), as well as Sarkozy’s predecessor as president, Jacques Chirac, and Fillon’s predecessor as prime minister, Dominique de Villepin. Prominent figures on the left are the Socialist Party’s unsuccessful presidential candidate in the 2007 election, Ségolène Royal, who would have been France’s first woman president, and François Hollande and Lionel Jospin, respectively, present and past heads of the Socialist Party.

Foreign Relations

Since World War II, France has played a leading international role, transforming itself from an major colonial power to the earliest and strongest advocate of European integration, as well as a strong supporter of broader international cooperation. France’s most important bilateral tie since the 1960s has been with Germany. France views Franco- German cooperation, as well as the development of an independent European defense capability, as the keys to enhanced European security. In the mid-1990s, relations between Paris and Berlin became somewhat strained when German reunification altered the two countries’ balance and Germany’s leaders were less prepared than their predecessors to subordinate Germany’s interests to French political leadership. Germany also sought to reduce its contributions to the European Union (EU) budget, a large share of which goes to subsidizing French agriculture. The two countries, leaving aside such frictions, took a common stand in opposing U.S.-led military action against Iraq in 2003.

France and the United States pursue parallel policies on most economic, political, and security issues and have a history of close cooperation, along with occasional strains. During the Cold War, tensions arose when France attempted to arbitrate between the United States and the Soviet Union. France also insisted on maintaining control of its nuclear arsenal, removing itself from the military leadership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in order to do so. Recent tensions arose in 2003 when France, unlike in the 1991 Gulf War, refused to back the use of force in Iraq. However, although France did not join the second U.S.-led coalition in Iraq, it joined the action in Afghanistan, contributed financially through the EU to Iraq reconstruction in 2003, and offered the Iraqi Interim Government assistance in the form of police training and debt relief. These actions have somewhat assuaged U.S. pique, as has the central role France has been playing in international efforts to combat terrorism. Some central figures in the Chirac administration, most notably, France’s first female defense minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie, made improved Franco-American relations a priority since the Iraq War. The Sarkozy administration is expected to continue seeking improved relations.

In other regions of the world, France plays a significant role through commercial activities, extensive development assistance programs, and defense agreements. French influence is especially strong in francophone Africa and to a lesser extent in the Arab world. In the Middle East, France has been active in urging the establishment of a Palestinian state through a multilateral peace process and has provided significant assistance to the Palestinian Authority.

France also has significant commercial and political relations in East Asia and Southeast Asia, as well as growing participation in regional organizations there. In Southeast Asia, France was an architect of the 1991 Paris Accords, which ended the conflict in Cambodia. In China, France is currently stepping up commercial competition with U.S. business. In Latin America, France has actively backed efforts to restore democracy to Haiti.

Human Rights

The main human rights issues that currently arouse concern in France stem from the legal, judicial, and intelligence reforms that target terrorism. France’s antiterrorism regime now supports constant operational surveillance of Islamic groups, defines the intent to commit terrorism as already a crime, provides wide scope to decide what constitutes terrorism, sets a low threshold for preemptive arrests and detentions without prompt counsel, and provides for wide latitude in judicial decision making. The entire system for monitoring and pursuing terrorists arguably outstrips the systems of most other democratic societies, including the United States, in both the system’s effectiveness and invasiveness.

Human rights groups, such as the Human Rights League, as well as large numbers of France’s defense magistrates have raised concern about French antiterrorism laws, charging an erosion of civil rights in the name of fighting terrorism. According to such critics, the legislation that makes “conspiracy to commit terrorism” a crime opens the door to arbitrary enforcement because a number of acts, which are not otherwise illegal, become illegal when a magistrate decides they occur in the context of intent to commit terrorism. Critics also charge that antiterrorist magistrates have excessive scope to decide what constitutes terrorism or the intent to commit it.

Another prominent human rights concern in recent years centers on the French government’s 2004 ban on the wearing of “conspicuous religious symbols” in public schools. The law, whose primary target is the wearing of Muslim headscarves in school, is viewed by many in France and abroad as incompatible with the principle of freedom of religion. The law is also criticized as an official manifestation of anti-Islamic prejudice.