Some are losing their temper, others are complaining, but everyone seems dismayed: since July, the result of the legislative elections has plunged political leaders into immense perplexity. In the absence of an absolute majority, no one seems to know how to form a government, build a majority, negotiate a roadmap. In a country where, since 1962, all the presidents of the Republic, with the exception of François Mitterrand in 1988 and Emmanuel Macron in 2022, have been able to trust the deputies with their finger in the seam of their trousers, parliamentary pluralism seems to be a real calamity.
No doubt, many European leaders smiled when they heard the complaints and indignations of French political leaders. Among the majority of our neighbours, “Minority parliaments”According to the Elysée, they are in fact the norm: far from making France a cursed land, the legislative elections of July, notes the political scientist Thierry Chopin, place French political life in the “beeline” European dynamics. In a country like Germany, where no party has governed alone since 1949, adds researcher Martin Baloge, the current fragmentation of the Bourbon Palace has nothing to do with it. “confused”.
Over the decades, our neighbours have learned to manage the fragmentation of their political landscape with patience and tact: for many years they have been betting on negotiation. At the end of the 2023 Spanish elections, the king asked the leader of the first party, the conservative one, to form a majority before asking, after his failure, the socialist party: after several weeks of discussions, Pedro Sánchez had formed a coalition government by concluding an alliance with the radical left and the nationalists. One hundred and sixteen days after the election, he obtained the investiture of the Chamber.
The members of the German Bundestag have also long mastered the art of coalition-building. In this parliamentary system in which the head of state is content with an honorary role, the name of the chancellor does not emerge one fine morning from the presidential hat: it is the fruit of a long negotiation between the political parties: eighty-six days in 2013, one hundred and seventy-one days in 2017 and seventy-three days in 2021. This long-term work culminates in the drawing up of a roadmap of around one hundred pages that the deputies of the Bundestag must respect once the coalition government has been formed. formed.
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