France

France has a Jacobin tradition, in other words a strong central state that regularly intervenes in public affairs. The decentralisation laws of 1982-83 that transferred certain state powers to local government bodies only partially reduced political centralisation. The constitutional regime designed for the Fifth Republic in 1958 is semi-presidential. It is characterised by the predominance of a more powerful executive branch than is usually found in other democracies. Election of the head of state (President) by universal suffrage (since 1962) bestows on this figure considerable popular legitimacy, while the Constitution confers broad powers on the office. Senior civil servants trained in the major state institutes play a crucial role in the executive. The overwhelming power of the president is achieved to the detriment of that of the parliament, which is bicameral. The National Assembly (577 members), elected by direct suffrage, is less powerful than was the Chamber of Deputies under the Fourth Republic (1946-1958). The Senate (321 members) represents local territorial units as well as the French abroad. It is elected by a college made up of deputies, regional and departmental councilors and municipal council delegates. This ‘second’ chamber must yield to the first in the event of political discord, and cannot dismiss the government. One specific feature of this arrangement is that it has made ministerial and parliamentary functions incompatible. Due to this rule, established in order to limit the power of the two chambers, it is primarily senior civil servants who are called upon to exercise executive and even parliamentary functions. Political parties in France are characterized by their weakness: their numbers are scant by comparison to many of their European counterparts. Less than three per cent of the voting population is estimated to belong to a political party. The party system is organized around two poles, the left and the right, each divided into two subsets. The right is separated into a moderate liberal wing, the Union pour la Démocratie française (UDF, Union for French Democracy) and the Gaullist authoritarian branch, mainly formed by the former Rassemblement pour la République (RPR, Rally for the Republic). The left is also split between a revolutionary left embodied by the French Communist Party (PC) and a moderate, reformist left represented by the Socialist Party (PS). ‘This “bipolar quadrille” constitutes the basic structure of the party system, its genetic imprint, so to speak’ (Mény, 1999, p. 56). The expansion of the Front National (FN, National Front) electoral base beginning in 1984 and that of Les Verts (the Greens), starting in 1989, has disrupted the traditional interplay among parties.