On the left, it’s often the same song when it comes to the Fifth Republic. It should be changed, and quickly. During the last presidential election, everyone, from Mélenchon to Jadot via Hidalgo and Taubira, had an institutional program that was not very innovative: strengthening Parliament, participatory democracy ad nauseam to better de-oxygenate presidentialism, etc. François Mitterrand, long before them, in his essay The Permanent Coup (Plon, 1964), denounces the practice of General de Gaulle’s personal power. A book that he will hardly assume once the doors of the Elysée opened to him, trying to make him forget, before embracing the function and presidentialism.
If it is the left which has ordered a thousand and one reports on the revision of the Constitution, it is the right which has most often reformed it. Jospin Commission under François Hollande, Vedel report under Mitterrand, Strauss-Kahn, Lang, Hollande, Bartolone, Valls reports… Socialist literature is as abundant on the subject as it has gathered dust in the libraries of the old pink house, sometimes without ever being debated by the elephants. “After Mitterrand, the left stopped all reflection on a rebalancing of the relationship between presidentialism and parliamentarism, and the PS, over time, rallied lazily to the first”, explains Paul Alliès, political scientist at the University of Montpellier and President of the famous Convention for a Sixth Republic (C6R), founded by a certain Arnaud Montebourg within the Socialist Party.
The lament of the left returned in the light of the battle against pension reform, as the government limited the time for debate in the National Assembly and used 49.3. For the left, the crisis is not only social, it is also institutional. And all, socialists, rebels, ecologists and communists, share the anger of the historian Pierre Rosanvallon, who believes that France is going through “the most serious democratic crisis” since the end of the Algerian conflict.
“We are lifelong neoconverts”
“I have the feeling that the V is out of breath, wrung out by the presidential practice of power, and today doubly wrung out by the personal practice of Emmanuel Macron, a form of dyed-in-the-wool populism, adds the socialist Boris Vallaud It is incapable of calmly organizing major debates, pathologically unfavorable to consultation and major compromises to overcome the challenges of our time.How do you build a real parliamentary system by devitalizing the powers of the president to transfer them to the Prime Minister? ” Olivier Faure, the first secretary of the PS, takes up the idea on the fly, and even proposes to reserve the right of dissolution to the Prime Minister. Above all, don’t tell him that the last socialist president proposed to remove Matignon… “If the Prime Minister has the right to dissolve then we are in a parliamentary regime”, retorts François Hollande to L’Express.
By signing the Nupes agreement which proposes to “pass to the Sixth Republic”, these same socialists have definitely followed in the footsteps of Jean-Luc Mélenchon. “We are neoconverts to the VIe”, confirms Faure. A position at little cost as the Insubordinate in chief, although he has written a lot on the subject, remains evasive on the content of his constitutional revolution which he has been advocating since the presidential campaign of 2012.
Him president, he would convene by referendum a Constituent Assembly whose only mandate would be to work out a new constitutional text. But the devil often hides in the details. Guest of Grand Jury of RTL on January 9, 2022, in the middle of the presidential campaign, Jean-Luc Mélenchon specifies his project: “During the work of the Constituent Assembly, and before moving on to the Sixth Republic, I will be a full-fledged president. I will be in charge the long term, in a spirit rather close to what General de Gaulle had imagined.” Mélenchon president, judge and party. Close the ban.