ABSTRACT
The party system of the Fifth Republic can be characterised as bipolar, firstly, on the basis of the parties’ relationship to government. The great unexpected development of the Fifth Republic was the emergence, from 1962, of the fait majoritaire – of stable majorities in the National Assembly, of either Right or Left, capable of sustaining a government in office for a whole parliament. Stable majorities have encouraged the development of more or less stable oppositions, capable at least of some measure of co-ordination both within the Assembly and at the approach of elections. Governments do not fall, as they had under the Third and Fourth Republics, on the whim of a single party or even of a fraction of a party within the governing coalition. The departure of the MRP ministers in 1962, for example, led to no more than a reshuffle. On the contrary, alternation in power under the Fifth Republic has always been the outcome of competition between left-wing and right-wing blocs. These blocs have remained relatively stable. Although a handful of individuals, such as the former Giscardian ministers in 1988, may change sides, whole parties do not; the Centre – with the partial exception of the 1988 parliament, the only one since 1962 where there was no overall majority – has never played the pivotal role it enjoyed under the Third and Fourth Republics. Nor has the Fifth Republic seen a grand coalition, grouping socialists and conservatives (as, for example, the CDU-SPD coalition in West Germany from 1966 to 1969). De Gaulle’s government of 1958 resembled one, but it fell apart as the new constitution came into force. Cohabitation involves an element of power-sharing by a president and a prime minister of opposed political camps, but the two heads of the executive are always in open competition and never present, as coalition partners do, a set of agreed policies and objectives. Competition for State power, then, is dominated by the two forces of Left and Right.
