Critics of France's Fifth Republic would do well to ponder this lesson. Rather than heedlessly throwing away the Constitution, they should draw inspiration from its astonishing flexibility, for who got the better of the monarch, on Friday, December 13? Who put the brakes on Emmanuel Macron's insatiable appetite for domination? The would-be prime minister, François Bayrou, who, as a keen specialist of the country's institutions, was able to take advantage of the fundamentally dual nature of the system, which is both presidential and parliamentary, embodied at its head by a dyarchy, two leaders that are condemned to get along.
Bayrou's fight to unseat the favorite, in this case, caretaker defense minister Sébastien Lecornu, whose qualities as a "facilitator" the Elysée had been praising, was not a first in France. In 2005, former prime minister Dominique de Villepin exerted the same kind of pressure on ex-president Jacques Chirac, to oust the favorite, then-defense minister Michèle Alliot-Marie. In both cases, the power grab succeeded because two conditions were simultaneously met: The leader was seriously weakened – Macron by the June dissolution of the Assemblée Nationale; Chirac by the "No" vote in the May 2005 referendum on the European Constitutional Treaty.
However, a relationship of trust also had to already exist between the two protagonists: de Villepin had been Chirac's staunch supporter in his bitter 1995 battle against then-presidential candidate Edouard Balladur. Bayrou and Macron were united by their 2017 alliance, which had permanently marginalized the left and the right by creating a central bloc whose existence, contested though it is, instead tries to consolidate its strength as it goes from crisis to crisis. This is still both men's common interest.
The reformist left, a new partner
Bayrou has been freed from the Elysée's guardianship, but has not yet broken with it on the fundamentals, and is still confronted with the same weaknesses as former prime minister Michel Barnier.
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