France: The Sixth Republic?

Could France be on the verge of a Sixth Republic? The redoubtable rightist, Marine Le Pen, is proposing reforms that “would radically change the Constitution,” avers professor Serge Slama of Grenoble-Alpes University, adding, “it would be almost like a new republic.” Madame Le Pen, invoking the “sovereignty of the people,” eyes a conservative tilt for a national charter that would, say, terminate birthright citizenship and tighten migration.Traditionally a Sixth Republic is a leftist project in France. The political dysfunction, economic malaise, and surging debt in France suggest the need for someone to offer strategic reform. Yet a member of France’s Council of State, Jean-Eric Schoettl, balks at the prospect that Madame Le Pen would dare to launch her reform by referendum. Quelle horreur. “It would amount to a double coup d’état, both in form and content,” growls Monsieur Schoettl.Where were such recriminations over referenda, though, when the French in 1992 were asked to approve via popular vote the Maastricht Treaty that subsumed France’s sovereignty under the European Union? That treaty passed with the slimmest of margins, just 51 percent of the voters. Some 35 years later, France could get a chance to reassert its national identity in the 2027 presidential race, in which the eurosceptique Madame Le Pen is a leading contender.The liberal Le Monde frets that Madame Le Pen is brewing “a political and legal revolution” and “defying the rule of law” embodied by the constitution of the Fifth Republic, dating to October 4, 1958. What’s not to like, though, about a referendum that professes to address “the essential questions of the control of immigration, of the protection of French nationality and identity and to make it possible to restore the primacy of national law”?It’s canny, too, for Madame Le Pen and her camarilla to defend the idea of a referendum, using Charles De Gaulle’s phrasing, as “the most Democratic path there is” to advance their reform agenda. Such a vote, the Le Pen proposal states, would reflect, “in an indisputable manner, the expression of the sovereign will of the French people.” Never mind that critics like Monsieur Schoettl suggest the immigration laws are no matter for a referendum.Hence the “more radical approach,” per Le Monde, being considered by Madame Le Pen — “to directly submit a constitution to the public.” That would amount, Le Monde says, to “calling for a sort of ‘Fifth Republic II,’” in which the citoyens “would be summoned to the polls” in the guise of a “constituent people,” and to cast their votes “on a new version of the Constitution” featuring the immigration reforms proposed by Madame Le Pen.Such a démarche would mean that “the framework of the Fifth Republic would be preserved,” Monsieur Slama sniffs, but “it would be a challenge — not in form, but in substance — to the guarantee of rights.” Such talk, along with Le Monde’s mutterings that a referendum “threatens the rule of law,” suggests that France’s liberal establishment fears letting the French have the final say in their future. De Gaulle had no such qualms about referendums. It was De Gaulle, after all, who was guided by what he called “a certain idea of France.” What would he make of his successors at the Elysée ceding French nationhood to the “ever closer union” of the superstate at Brussels? Madame Le Pen’s proposed referendum vows that “its approval” would “restore to our Nation — in the eyes of the world, and above all the European Union — control over its destiny in these areas that are vital to its sovereignty.”

France: The Sixth Republic?

France: The Sixth Republic?

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