Is France's Fifth Republic Doomed?

Is France’s Fifth Republic, successor to a paralyzed and powerless Fourth Republic in 1958, slated for a similar fate? Since early March, workers and students have aimed a series of massive strikes at the Socialist government of President Francois Hollande. The footage of masked protesters colliding with riot police, piles of blazing tires outside oil refineries, shuttered gas stations, and police cars set ablaze suggests a flailing and perhaps failing government. At the very least, the defection of their traditional rank-and-file reflects the grave crisis now confronting the Socialist Party. More important, these events betray a deeper institutional and political crisis. The question French newspapers are asking as the government confronts this spring of deepening discontent -- “Où est la sortie?” (Where’s the exit?) -- should now also be asked about the republic over which Hollande was meant to reign.

The crisis has been long simmering. On the international stage -- the president’s preserve under the Fifth Republic -- Hollande has been mostly a walk-on. Apart from the military operations he launched in Mali and the Central African Republic against radical Islamic movements, he has been repeatedly checkmated. Eager to oust Syrian President Bashar al Assad, Hollande was embarrassed by U.S. President Barack Obama’s last-minute decision to pull back. Sympathetic to the predicament of a bankrupt Greece, Hollande failed to budge Germany’s austerity demands. Dignified in the wake of last year’s terrorist attacks, he then instructed his Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, to pursue a misbegotten law allowing the government to strip convicted French terrorists of their citizenship.

Ultimately, Valls failed to pass the bill and succeeded in alienating dozens of Socialist deputies who had opposed it. These “rebels” were further galvanized when Valls announced a series of changes to France’s labor code. Modest by the standards of most European countries -- employers would be given greater freedom to change the 35-hour work week, and greater say in hiring and firing workers -- the legislation provoked a rebellion within the party, forcing Valls to invoke a rarely used constitutional wrinkle to pass the law without a general vote. An attempt by the rebels to bring down their own government fell short by just two votes.

But the government has not been able to staunch the rebellion on the streets. The protests have taken two different, but equally menacing, directions. The first, Nuit Debout (Rise Up at Night), is unprecedented. Convening every evening at Place de la République, thousands of students, workers, and activists practice direct democracy. Holding general assemblies -- one part group therapy session, one part constituent assembly -- participants speak briefly on issues ranging from unfair housing practices to the ongoing state of emergency.

The movement’s slogan -- “Our Dreams Don’t Fit Your Ballot Boxes” -- is a worthy ideal, but hard to translate into policy. As for the other form of protest, its anti-government slogan might as well be “Your Dreams Are Our Nightmares.” These traditional labor union strikes are rooted in the long history of what, 40 years ago, sociologist Michel Crozier called “la société bloquée,” or “the stalled society.” The French, Crozier argued, distrust negotiation and compromise, and do not identify with political parties. Given their “horror of face-to-face contact,” their resistance to cooperation, and their fear of innovation, the French are most comfortable with confrontation. The take-no-prisoners policy of both the government and the General Federation of Workers, the militant union leading the strikes, suggests that Crozier’s analysis is still pertinent. With the start next week of the Euro Cup football championship, hosted by France, one or the other side will have to blink.

In 1958, when France was fissuring over the question of Algeria, the unencumbered exercise of executive power had its attractions. Allergic to a parliamentary system incapable of responding to such crises, Charles de Gaulle endowed the new republic with a powerful, nearly monarchic presidency. Directly elected to a seven-year term, the president was answerable neither to parliament nor his own government. With day-to-day affairs left to the prime minister, the president’s task was to yoke the French to “great undertakings” that would keep France in the first rank of nations. And, until the student rebellion of 1968, the French mostly went along.

Since de Gaulle left the political scene, however, a bipolar world has splintered into many poles, a Europe of nation-states has softened into a supranational sludge of laws and regulations, and national economies have been shackled to a single currency. Whereas Bourbon kings answered only to God, and de Gaulle answered only to France, his successors answer only to Brussels. The internet and social media, moreover, have “desacralized” a presidency that required majesty and mystery. Whereas de Gaulle’s private life was taboo, tabloids have feasted on the private lives of recent presidents. Following the bling-bling years of Nicolas Sarkozy, Hollande had promised a return to “normalcy.” What he really meant, it seems, was “mediocrity” -- a distinction captured when paparazzi ambushed Hollande as he stole away from the Elysée Palace for an affair with an actress. He did so on a moped, his head hidden under a large black helmet -- a measure of the distance France had traveled from a president who wore a helmet atop a tank.

In 2000, the office’s seven-year term was trimmed back to five years. But this and similar tweaks, resulting in a kind of Gaullism Lite, simply underscore the system’s fundamental dissonance. The Republic’s stability and integrity flow from an era and office that, in effect, only its founder could properly embody. Novelist André Malraux may well have been right to think de Gaulle was equal to his myth. But even the General would be hard-pressed to resist the global forces and transnational powers that now bear upon the Elysée.

De Gaulle perhaps foresaw this changed world. Shortly before his death, he confided to Malraux: “I had no predecessor and will have no successor.” This need not be as grim a forecast as the boast of an earlier ruler: “After me, the deluge.” A growing number of political theorists as well as notable political figures, including Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Arnaud Montebourg, have argued for a new republic endowed with more powerful legislative and more modest executive branches. Such a republic would correspond to the aspirations of movements like Nuit Debout that demand a more responsive and representative government.

Also at play, however, is the deeply rooted national reflex for a “providential man,” a powerful and charismatic figure, from Napoleon through Clemenceau to de Gaulle, capable of unblocking France. Two years ago, in a much-discussed Le Monde poll, nearly nine out of ten respondents wished for a “true leader capable of re-establishing order.” The most likely candidate for this providential man is, in fact, a woman: Marine Le Pen, leader of the extreme right-wing National Front. Le Pen’s approval ratings continue to climb, and last month, in a poll taken for the newspaper Le Parisien, she outdistanced Hollande in the second round of next year’s presidential election, 55 percent to 45 percent.

While she fares less well against some of the other contenders, Le Pen’s growing strength nevertheless underscores the republic’s predicament: its survival perhaps depends on someone whose politics resembles that of another providential figure: Philippe Pétain, the head of the xenophobic, reactionary, and authoritarian Vichy regime. Over the next few weeks, it is not just the Euro Cup, but perhaps also the Fifth Republic that will be at stake.