Explainer: What does a French president do?

PARIS: French voters go to the ballot box on April 10 and 24 to elect a new president or to re-elect the incumbent Emmanuel Macron, who is eligible to stand for a second and final consecutive five-year term.

France’s head of state enjoys considerable powers compared to many other world leaders. FRANCE 24 takes a closer look at those powers and the checks and balances in place to rein them in.

France has features of both presidential and parliamentary systems of government. But it is clear which player enjoys the broadest powers.

“French presidents have more power than the leaders of most other advanced democracies including Germany, the United Kingdom and, arguably, the United States,” the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations explained in 2017.

“They not only command the executive apparatus, including the armed forces, but tend to drive the national policymaking agenda with little parliamentary oversight,” it added.

A French president is directly elected by the people and can only be relieved of his duties by the nation’s parliament in the extraordinary circumstance of a “dereliction of his duties manifestly incompatible with the exercise of his mandate”.

In contrast, the president has the power to dissolve the parliament at any time.

So what does a French president do? And when does the Élysée Palace’s chief tenant have to share his or (someday) her powers?

COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF OF ARMED FORCES, HEAD OF DIPLOMACY

Although the French Constitution, the founding text of the Fifth Republic adopted in 1958, assigns defence and diplomacy to the prime minister and the president as shared responsibilities, both areas have in practice become the preserve of France’s head of state. The latter is the constitutional guarantor of the nation’s independence and its territorial integrity.

As commander-in-chief of the armed forces, the president chairs the national defence councils and special committees that define France’s line on military programming, deterrence, the conduct of foreign operations and counterterrorism.

The French president can alone take the decision to deploy a nuclear force.

A French president cannot, however, declare war on his own. The Constitution stipulates that a “declaration of war is authorised by the parliament”, although that provision has yet to be applied since France’s guiding text was adopted in 1958.

The president does, however, have the power to deploy the armed forces abroad without informing the parliament in advance. The government then has three days to inform the legislative body of the operation, at which point lawmakers can hold a debate on the deployment but not a vote. Parliament does pronounce on whether or not a deployment can be extended beyond four months.

France’s president also helms the country’s diplomacy. He meets with foreign heads of state and ensures France’s representation abroad, in foreign countries and at international institutions.

The president also negotiates and ratifies treaties in France’s name and is the guarantor of the country’s treaty obligations. He is also empowered to name and accredit French ambassadors abroad.

HEAD OF THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH

The French Constitution and the president’s election by direct universal suffrage accords the head of state with considerable prerogatives for governing the country.

The president names the prime minister and can terminate the prime minister’s duties. He chairs the Council of Ministers cabinet meeting, promulgates laws, can submit a draft law for approval by referendum and has the power to dissolve the lower house of parliament, the National Assembly.

The president sets the reform agenda for his or her government. He also has the power to convene parliament for an extraordinary session to consider a specific matter.

Beyond the Constitution per se, the exercise of power in France over time is what has made the French president’s role so broad. From the start, Charles de Gaulle, the Fifth Republic’s first president and one of its founding fathers, established himself as a sort of “republican monarch”, as the constitutional law expert Maurice Duverger put it in 1974.

But reforms this century further contributed to the predominance of the presidency in France. In 2000, the length of a presidential term was shortened from seven years to five, a constitutional change greenlit at the ballot box by referendum. The change brought presidential mandates into line with the five-year terms lawmakers serve in the National Assembly.

The following year, the order of the legislative and presidential elections was inverted to put the presidential vote first. That move made it all the more likely that a people who had chosen their president only weeks prior would next seek to give the new leader the legislative wherewithal needed to make good on campaign pledges.

Both changes had the effect of bolstering a president’s power by removing an element of instability in French political life: They drastically reduced the risk of “cohabitation”, when a president and a prime minister hail from rival political parties.

SHARED POWERS

Apart from those outlined above, some of the powers a French president holds are “shared” in that they require the prime minister or the relevant cabinet minister to sign off on them.

One is the power to nominate individuals to certain functions, like the prefect who represents the state in each département (administrative unit) and region, the councillors of the Council of State and Court of Audit, and school district chiefs, all named in the framework of the cabinet meeting.

The French head of state also shares statutory powers with the prime minister. The president signs the orders and decrees that govern the rules in place in domains where legislation isn’t necessary.