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Cake day: April 27th, 2024

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  • This is very simplified and of course, biased as I am a regular citizen with some political ideology but I’ll try and be as neutral as I can.

    Well, we just voted for a new parliament. Ever since 1957 (when the 5th republic pretty much started), there have been mostly obvious winners for these elections, implying that culturally our political parties have not been the best at negotiating.

    The president is responsible for naming a prime minister from the majority but the definition of a majority can be odd because of how impeachment works. There have been quite a few situations in which the president and his prime minister were from different parties, rendering the president’s powers basically symbolic for day-to-day stuff, the prime minister was then handling pretty much everything.

    But during these times, the prime ministers had large majorities and there was little to no chance of the prime minister being fired by parliament.

    The censorship motion (which I might call « firing » or « impeaching » because I have no clue how to properly translate this) basically works as such: someone calls for it, and it requires 289/577 representatives to vote yay. There may be negotiations in order for non-allied yet not-too-hostile groups to not vote, which is what is happening right now.

    But now, even though the left won, they have too few allies to prevent being censored by parliament. There are basically three groups with approximately equal numbers of representatives: left, center-right and far right. So if a left prime minister were to be appointed, the two other groups would impeach them, and so on for other groups.

    But here comes the special role of « king maker » of the far right: they laid their conditions for not impeaching a right-leaning government, and the left does not have enough representatives to impeach this newly appointed person.

    And since it’s still the president’s responsibility to appoint a prime minister, Macron negotiated with the far right to try and appoint Barnier.

    So what’s left to figure is: what the far right requires, how long this government will stand and whether Macron will call for new elections next year. There may be no elections for the next 10 months, even if Macron resigns, so we’re stuck with this odd situation which has never happened with the current constitution of France.

    It’s a bit hard summarizing everything but I hope I got the point across.