Page 295 - DPOL202_COMPARATIVE_POLITICS_AND_GOVERNMENT_ENGLISH

Comparative Politics and Government

Notes powers. The 1958 constitution of the Fifth Republic made only modest departures from the classic
representative model. Although the constitution was submitted to the electorate for approval, the
direct appeal to the voters that it permitted under carefully prescribed conditions was hedged by
parliamentary controls.
Between 1958 and 1969 the French electorate voted five times on referendums (see again Table
12.2). In 1958 a vote against the new constitution might have involved the country in a civil war,
which it had narrowly escaped a few months earlier. The two referendums that followed endorsed
the peace settlement in the Algerian War. In 1962, hardly four years after he had enacted by
referendum his “own” constitution, General de Gaulle asked the electorate to endorse a constitutional
amendment of great significance: to elect the president of the Republic by direct popular suffrage.
Public opinion polls reveal that both popular election of the president and consultation of the
electorate by referendum on important issues are widely approved. Favorable attitudes toward the
referendum and the popular election of the president, however, did not prevent the electorate from
voting down another proposal submitted by de Gaulle in 1969, thereby causing his resignation.
Nothing in the constitution compelled de Gaulle to resign, but his highly personal concept of his
role, no longer accepted by a majority of the electorate, made his resignation inevitable.
Since 1969 there have been only four referendums. President Georges Pompidou called a referendum
for the admission of Britain to the Common Market. (For the results of referendums and presidential
elections between 1958 and 2000, see Table 12.2) The first referendum during the Mitterrand period,
in 1988, dealt with approval for an accord between warring parties on the future of New Caledonia;
the referendum was a condition of the agreement. Sixty-three percent of the voters stayed home,
but the accord was approved. The electorate was far more extensively mobilized when the question
of ratifying the so-called Maastricht Treaty on the European Union was submitted to referendum in
September 1992, and the results were far more significant for the future of French political life. The
2000 referendum– on reduction of the presidential term from seven to five years– was over-
whelmingly approved (by 73 percent of those who voted), but the referendum was most notable for
the record number of abstentions—almost 70 percent.
Public opinion polls indicate that the referendum as a form of public participation is regarded
favorably by the electorate. It ranked just behind the popularly elected presidency and the
Constitutional Council, among the most highly approved institutional innovations of the Fifth
Republic. In one of its first moves, the new government under President Jacques Chirac in 1995
passed a constitutional amendment that expanded the use of the referendum in the areas of social
and economic policy.

Voting in Presidential Elections
Presidential elections by direct popular suffrage are for French voters the most important expressions
of the general will. After the presidential elections of 1965, it became evident that French voters
derived great satisfaction from knowing that, unlike past parliamentary elections, national and not
parochial alignments were at stake, and that they were invited to pronounce themselves effectively
on such issues. The traditional and once deeply rooted attitude that the only useful vote was against
the government no longer made sense when almost everybody knew that the task was to elect an
executive endowed with strong powers for seven years. Accordingly, turnout in presidential
elections, with one exception, has been the highest of all elections.
The nomination procedures for presidential candidates make it very easy to put a candidate on the
first ballot, far easier than in presidential primaries in the United States. So far, however, no
presidential candidate, not even de Gaulle in 1965, has obtained the absolute majority needed to
ensure election on the first ballot. In runoffs, held two weeks after the first ballot, only the two most
successful candidates face each other. All serious candidates are backed by a party or a coalition of
parties, the provisions of the law notwithstanding. Nevertheless, with a record number of candidates
in 2002 (16), this proposition was stretched to the limit.

290 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY