Loïc Blondiaux is a specialist in matters of democracy and citizens' political participation. A professor in the political science department at the Paris-I Panthéon-Sorbonne university, he coordinated, together with Bernard Manin, the collective publication Le Tournant délibératif de la démocratie ("The deliberative turn of democracy").

With a hung Assemblée Nationale, has France become ungovernable?

The results of these parliamentary elections are those of a proportional vote, with three fairly comparable blocs. This Assemblée could appear ungovernable if viewed according to the categories used to analyze power under the Fifth Republic.

Yet it is not at all ungovernable by the standards of most other European democracies. It is no more divided than the German or Italian parliaments, whose MPs, elected under a mixed voting system predominantly based on proportional representation, are capable of building coalition governments that are far more representative of the population and more effective than the French system is, with its majority voting system where the winner usually takes all.

Until recently, the "majority factor," which favors the emergence of a clear majority supporting the president's bloc, has dominated our political system, except during periods of "cohabitation." (A term for when the president must appoint a prime minister from a party opposed to his own.) This particular configuration no longer exists. today, no political force now represents more than a third of the electorate. None of the three blocs can lay claim to the entirety of legislative and executive power. In a way, this situation offers us a historic opportunity to break with the centralization of power and invent a form of parliamentarization of French political affairs.

Over the past two years, we've seen how difficult such alliances are to establish in the Assemblée Nationale. Do the conditions seem more favorable to you today?

The major difference with the situation in 2022 is that the president can no longer act as if he had a majority. The Constitution does not allow him to impose his choices.

With such a three-way split in the electorate, we're up against the wall. The way power is practiced will have to adapt to the political reality, which means adopting an ethics of responsibility rather than an ethics of conviction, to use Max Weber's categories. In other words, finally accepting negotiation and compromise.

Do you think the political players are capable of this?

That's the great unknown. History shows us that a political culture can't be changed in a matter of days. For both Jean-Luc Mélenchon [radical left-wing La France Insoumise party leader] and Laurent Wauquiez [a leading figure of the right-wing Les Républicains party], any negotiation would seem like a betrayal. However, this is no longer the time for radical posturing. Given the political balance of power, none of the camps has the means to fundamentally transform French society in opposition to the other two parts of the population.

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