France's Fifth Republic tested as prime ministers fall in rapid succession

France has cycled through five prime ministers in the 17 months since President Emmanuel Macron dissolved the National Assembly and called a snap legislative election in June 2024. The most recent, Sébastien Lecornu, lasted 26 days before tendering his resignation last Monday, only to be reappointed by Friday evening. The episode has laid bare a structural defect that predates Macron by decades: the Fifth Republic was engineered to produce a dominant president backed by a compliant parliamentary majority, not to manage a hung parliament.

A system built for stability that now produces paralysis

When Charles de Gaulle drafted the constitution of the Fifth Republic in 1958, his overriding aim was to end the chronic instability of the Fourth Republic, which saw 21 governments in 12 years. The new architecture concentrated extraordinary power in the presidency: the head of state appoints the prime minister, can dissolve parliament, and governs by decree in broad areas. Since 1958, France has had only eight presidents. For most of that period, the system delivered exactly what de Gaulle intended, a strong executive with a reliable legislative majority.

The mechanics reinforce that outcome. A two-round presidential election forces voters to coalesce around a consensus candidate, and since Jacques Chirac's second term, legislative elections have been scheduled immediately after the presidential vote, producing a 'honeymoon' majority for the newly elected president. The parliament becomes, in effect, a consultative body. But when voters deny the president a majority, as they did in June 2024, the institutional logic collapses.

No institutional pathway for compromise

The June 2024 election returned a fragmented National Assembly in which three broad blocs, the left-wing New Popular Front, Macron's centrist alliance, and Marine Le Pen's National Rally, each fell well short of an absolute majority. In a parliamentary system, this would trigger coalition negotiations. In France, the constitution offers no formal mechanism for coalition-building. The president names a prime minister who must survive a confidence vote, but the government can be toppled at any time by a motion of censure supported by an absolute majority of deputies.

That threshold is high, but the political dynamic is perverse. Because power is so heavily skewed toward the presidency, opposition parties calculate that their leverage lies in refusal, not cooperation. Any minister who negotiates with the executive risks being accused of betrayal by their own base. The result is a series of minority governments that survive only as long as no single opposition bloc decides to bring them down.

The presidential horizon dominates every calculation

Gilles Gressani, director of Le Grand Continent and president of the Groupe d'études géopolitiques, argues that the 2027 presidential election now structures every political decision. "In reality, everyone is only thinking about the presidential election," he said. "In France almost all the mid-high-level political actors, but also economic actors, are really thinking about what they could do to become president of the French republic." That calculation extends to potential ministers. Lecornu, in his brief valedictory remarks, acknowledged that the presidential ambitions of heavyweight politicians were interfering with stability and said his future ministers would have to "commit to disconnect from presidential ambitions for 2027."

The remark underscores a peculiar French pathology: senior figures treat ministerial office not as a destination but as a platform for a future presidential run. That incentivises grandstanding over governance. It also means that any prime minister who tries to build a working majority in parliament is undercut by ministers who are already campaigning for the next Élysée campaign.

Looking across the Rhine and the Alps

The contrast with France's neighbours has become a recurring theme in the domestic debate. Standing beside German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in August 2025, Macron pointed to the German model: "On the other side of the Rhine, it appears that a conservative party and a socialist party are managing to work together. That happens not so far from us, and it works, so I think it's possible." He was referring to the Koalitionsvertrag, the detailed coalition contract, negotiated between the CDU/CSU and the SPD after the 2025 German federal election.

Italy, long cited as the epitome of political volatility, now looks steadier by comparison. Marc Lazar, a professor at Sciences Po, notes that the coalition led by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has held for nearly three years. "This [tradition of compromise] could be an Italian lesson for the French parties that don't have it," he said. The difference is cultural as much as institutional: Italian parties have decades of experience stitching together governing agreements; French parties have none.

The far right's veto power

Marine Le Pen's National Rally holds the largest single bloc in the National Assembly, giving it effective veto power over any government that does not command an absolute majority. No sooner had Lecornu announced his resignation than Le Pen threatened to topple his successor, whoever that may be. The threat is credible: a motion of censure backed by the National Rally and the left-wing New Popular Front would reach the 289-vote threshold. That gives Le Pen decisive influence over budgetary and legislative priorities without ever joining a government.

This dynamic is not new. Under the Fifth Republic, cohabitation, when the president and prime minister come from opposing camps, has occurred three times (1986-88, 1993-95, 1997-2002). Each produced policy paralysis. The current situation is worse: there is no coherent opposition majority, only a negative coalition capable of blocking but not of governing.

Proportional representation and the Sixth Republic debate

Critics have long argued that the two-round, single-member constituency system for legislative elections exaggerates majorities when they exist and deepens fragmentation when they do not. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of La France Insoumise, made a transition to a "Sixth Republic" with proportional representation a centrepiece of his 2022 presidential campaign. Establishment parties dismissed the proposal as self-serving, but the current impasse has revived the conversation. Proportional representation would likely institutionalise coalition politics, forcing parties to negotiate, a cultural shift the French system has never required.

Any constitutional reform requires either a referendum or a three-fifths majority in a joint session of parliament (Congress). Neither Macron nor his successors have shown appetite for a reform that would dilute presidential power. The president's seven-year term (reduced to five in 2000) and the absence of term limits until 2008 were designed to ensure continuity. The irony is that the system's rigidity now threatens the very stability it was built to guarantee.

A system awaiting its next stress test

Lecornu's reappointment buys time but resolves nothing. The structural incentives remain unchanged: opposition parties gain more from obstruction than from cooperation, ministers eye the 2027 presidential race, and the president retains the power to dissolve parliament again, a nuclear option he cannot use until June 2025, one year after the last dissolution. Until then, France will be governed by a minority executive surviving on sufferance, its legislative agenda hostage to the calculus of the next presidential election.