La République
4/15/20
The French Government
France has experienced quite a few governments in its time. The latest of these is the 5th Republic, established in the autumn of 1958 (as mentioned in my Charles de Gaulle timeline). It bears enough similarities with the US government to be slightly familiar, but is most certainly its own unique system. It has a bicameral legislature that at a glance looks like ours – a Senate and National Assembly like our Senate and House of Representatives – but with the key difference that members come from a much larger selection of parties. France also distinguishes itself from the US by having both a president and a prime minister. The president (currently Emmanuel Macron) is the head of state, and the prime minister (currently Edouard Philippe) is the head of government. This means that the president focuses on representing the nation as a whole, especially internationally, and the prime minister focuses on the domestic functions of the government. As for the courts, we in the US are used to a supreme court that can strike down any law or executive action that is unconstitutional, but in France the highest courts can only strike down executive actions. The reason for this is because France, like most continental European countries, uses a civil law system rather than a case law one. I would love to unleash my political science knowledge, but I should not else this post would be about three times longer than it will already be.
A major difference between France and the United States is that France has far more active and “viable” parties. These generally form coalitions, which then act similarly to the large parties that we have in the US – but still in far higher numbers. Another difference is in structure. The French equivalent to a state is called a département, but these have nowhere near the independence that the states of the United States have.
Right now, the French government’s most pressing concerns are both due to COVID-19 (as might be expected). The first is the rising death toll among the infected and the second is keeping the economy running enough to avoid long-term downturns.
The number of fatalities in France has increased past 17,000 in the past week, especially among the elderly. The pandemic is definitely still active in the country, and Health Ministry Director Jerome Salomon has called on the public to continue respecting their confinement. But there is hope. For the first time since the outbreak began, the number of people hospitalized for the virus has dropped in France, including the number in intensive care. The number of confirmed cases, while still rising, is now much slower. This comes at the same time that the number of Italians in ICU is also falling.
On the economic side, the French government has increased its economic support measures by more than double, going from 45 to 110 billion euros. The French economy is likely to shrink up to 8%, according to Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire, and the country’s budget deficit is setting a new post-WW2 record. The International Monetary Fund expects the world economy to suffer the worst it has since the Great Depression, dwarfing the recession of 2009.
But I have faith that France will weather this storm. The French have known suffering before, and every time they have endured. The Hundred Years’ War, the Great Mortality, the famine of 1789, the Dreyfus Affair, the World Wars, terrorism, social upheaval, you name it, they have overcome it.
Sources:
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/fr.html