ABSTRACT
Despite this general commitment to civilised procedures, there is no concealing the fact that when the parliamentary majority is opposed to the president, a sizeable part of power within the executive tandem crosses the Seine from the Élysée to Matignon. This is obvious, in the first place, in the area of appointments. The choice of prime minister becomes largely formal, however much presidents faced with a hostile majority may attempt a show of considering several candidates, as the appointments of Chirac in 1986, Balladur in 1993, and Jospin in 1997 show. The president also has no effective voice in the choice of other ministers: although Chirac claimed, in 1986, that Mitterrand had vetoed both Jean Lecanuet for the Foreign Affairs portfolio and François Léotard for Defence, this ‘veto’ was wielded with the connivance of the Prime Minister, who was himself lukewarm about both appointments but found it convenient to blame the President for the two men’s disappointed ambitions. Nor has the president any way of circumventing the constitution in order to sack his prime minister – except by dissolving the National Assembly in the hope of a changed majority, something that no president has yet attempted in time of cohabitation. In negotiating the wide range of other appointments, in the administration or the public sector, which the two heads of the executive constitutionally share, the president is often reduced to bargaining for suitable alternative jobs for his own men displaced by the prime minister’s choices. It is true that the prime minister’s hand in appointments during cohabitation is less free than the president’s is in ‘normal’ times. In particular, the prime minister’s dependence on the parliamentary majority makes it indispensable to lock in the support of the party leaders within that majority, which can most obviously be done by giving them ministerial office. The prime minister’s power of patronage at all levels is nevertheless vastly enhanced by cohabitation.
