In the history of the Fifth Republic, the twelve years of Jacques Chirac’s presidency (1995–2007), i.e. the longest presidency after that of François Mitterrand (1981–1995), featured some unique approaches to political-institutional relations. One of these was cyclical. Linked to the dissolution of the National Assembly in 1997 and the victory of the “plural left” (Gauche plurielle), it had caused a third cohabitation since 1958, the longest (1997–2002). This weakened the presidential function and led Jacques Chirac to accept, in 2000, the shortening of the President’s mandate to five years. Then, on 24 April 2001, Parliament adopted an organic law allowing legislative elections to be organised after the presidential election in 2002, which basically amounted to a reversal of the calendar. Finally, the failure of the referendum on the European Constitutional Treaty (54.68% of “no” votes), on 29 May 2005, was an important event in the history of the Fifth Republic. The previous ones (nine in all) had been victorious for the Head of State, with the exception, that is, of the 27 April 1969 referendum on regionalisation and Senate reform. That defeat weakened the powers of the President of the Republic. Jacques Chirac took note of the “sovereign decision” of the French people. However, despite being pressured to resign by people like Philippe de Villiers, he refused to do so, unlike General De Gaulle in 1969. After 2005, the referendum tool was no longer used by the President of the Republic, even though it had been a pillar of Gaullist power and had served as a direct link between the head of state and the people, considering that no less than five referendums were organised in ten years, from 1958 to 1969.

The Chirac years brought about fourteen revisions of the Constitution. Historian Mathias Bernard describes this as a “revisionist frenzy” (Bernard, 2008, 265). Few of those revisions, aside from the adoption of the five-year term, modified the powers of the President and Parliament. An exception was the constitutional law of 4 August 1995, which extended the scope of the referendum to “any bill bearing (…) on reforms relating to the economic or social policy of the nation and the public services which contribute thereto” and established the single parliamentary session. Neither President Chirac nor his successors jumped at this new chance of organising referendums on economic or societal issues.

The twelve years of the Chirac presidency can be divided into three periods. During these, the primacy of the Head of State went through highs and lows.

An All-Mighty President?

When he entered the Élysée Palace in 1995, Jacques Chirac capitalised on a situation that was from the get-go very auspicious—perhaps the best since 1958—for the relations between the President of the Republic, the Prime Minister, and Parliament.

The new head of state had extensive experience in political life: in the Assembly, considering that he was first elected as deputy for Corrèze in 1967 and was thereafter consistently re-elected; in governments, given that his first portfolio as “secretary of state for social affairs, in charge of employment problems” was entrusted to him on 6 April 1967 and he led various ministries under the Pompidou presidency, including Agriculture (1972–1974) and the Interior (1974); at Matignon, where he served as Prime Minister of President Giscard d’Estaing (1974–1976) and President Mitterrand (1986–1988); and, finally, as mayor of Paris, elected to that office in 1977. In 1976 he founded the Rassemblement pour la République (RPR), one of the four great French political forces which claimed to be the heirs of Gaullism, and he presided over it from 1976 to 1994. After 1958, he was the only former Prime Minister, besides Georges Pompidou, to access the supreme magistracy; the two politicians remain, to this day, the only ones to have done it (Dulong, 2021).

In the National Assembly, Chirac had a very large majority, the strongest since 1968. Elected in March 1993, it consisted of 472 deputies out of 577 (82%), including 257 elected RPR members, the most numerous parliamentary group. The novelty for a right-wing President was that, for the first time under the Fifth Republic, he had the majority in the Senate (which had been dominated by the right since 1986), foremost among which was the RPR group, led by Charles Pasqua. In 1998, the RPR won the presidency of the Senate for the first time: Christian Poncelet succeeded the centrist René Monory and remained in office until 2008.

Finally, Jacques Chirac appointed Alain Juppé at Matignon. He was one of Chirac’s closest friends and also his former Minister of the Budget (1986–1988). In 1993 Juppé had been appointed as Minister of Foreign Affairs, but he had also served as secretary general of the RPR (1988–1994) and had been president interim of the RPR since November 1994. Chirac later described Juppé as “the best of us” and stated that their relationship “has always been natural, genuine and spontaneous” (Chirac, 2009, 389). Juppé’s election as president of the RPR by 92.61% of the votes was an indication of his popularity within the movement. By choosing Juppé, a long-time faithful collaborator endowed with political capital, Jacques Chirac had “shuffled the cards”, and all the Prime Ministers he would appoint during his term in office would fit that profile (Dulong, 2021, 63). He wrote that he had learned, by working with Georges Pompidou, that “if Matignon and Élysée did not get along, it would lead to an implosion” (Chirac, 2011, 488).

But behind those appearances, the situation was less simple for the new President, for two reasons. The first was caused by internal rifts in the majority parties, the RPR and the UDF, which had started in 1989. These were further aggravated by the fratricidal duel between Jacques Chirac and Édouard Balladur in the first round of the 1995 presidential election. Tensions within the majority had been rising in the aftermath of the previous presidential election, when Jacques Chirac, the RPR’s second-time candidate, faced Raymond Barre, the UDF’s candidate. They surfaced in April 1989, when twelve young right-wing elected officials (six from the UDF: the centrists Dominique Baudis, Bernard Bosson, and François Bayrou, and the liberals Philippe de Villiers, François d’Aubert, and Charles Millon; six from the RPR: Michel Barnier, Alain Carignon, François Fillon, Michel Noir, Étienne Pinte, and Philippe Séguin) launched a “renovation” operation designed to put an end to the domination Giscard d’Estaing and Chirac had exerted over their parties. The protest, which also targeted Alain Juppé, secretary general of the RPR, was extremely hurtful for Jacques Chirac. In his memoirs, he wrote: “the debate I am confronted with (…) has never been so crucial since the beginning of my political engagement. It urges me primarily to retreat within myself, to confront the inevitable solitude that follows defeat” (Chirac, 2009, 386). However, this threat was quickly dismissed because the “renovators” were defeated in the RPR’s National Council (12.66% against 87.34% for the movement’s leadership) and then during the RPR Congress (in February 1990), when the Chirac-Juppé motion won by a majority of 68.32% of the votes against 31.68% for the Pasqua-Séguin one.

But the Treaty of Maastricht (7 February 1992), which laid the foundations of the European Union, resuscitated those divisions. While Jacques Chirac endorsed its ratification in the September 20 referendum and was supported by a majority of the RPR, Séguin and Pasqua strongly opposed it. Some of the wounds appeared to have been healed by 1995, when Séguin and Juppé supported the Chirac candidacy. But Chirac’s resentment towards those who had backed Édouard Balladur, Prime Minister of the second cohabitation (1993–1995), a candidate long favoured in the polls, was strong. It lasted throughout the first years of his presidency and was expressed mostly against Nicolas Sarkozy and Charles Pasqua, on the RPR side, and François Léotard and Simone Veil, on the UDF side. None of them joined the Juppé government, with a few exceptions, François Fillon and Michel Barnier (RPR) and the centrists François Bayrou and Philippe Douste-Blazy. According to Pasqua’s formula: “Jacques Chirac has decided to refuse the amam (spearing to death a defeated enemy or a rebel in the Arab tribal tradition) to the supporters of Édouard Balladur”! (Pasqua, 2008, 326). Nicolas Sarkozy was very much aware of this “cruelty” when he stated that “All the bitterness, the detestation, the intoxication of the victors was directed almost entirely at me” (Sarkozy, 2019, 103). He had to wait five years to return to the government as minister, in 2002, following his support of Chirac in the presidential election.

After the election, the appointment of the Liberal Alain Juppé to Matignon, who was preferred over the social Gaullist Philippe Séguin, came as a surprise. It appeared to contradict the dominant theme of Chirac’s electoral campaign, the “social fracture” that Séguin, among others, had instigated. The President was torn between his campaign promises and the constraints posed by the weight of the state debt and the need to meet the criteria set by the Maastricht Treaty for the adoption of the euro (Sirinelli, 2008).

Before long, it became clear that the excellent relationship between President Chirac and his Prime Minister was at odds with the tenser relationship between Alain Juppé and the parliamentary majority or the Prime Minister’s huge unpopularity. In his memoirs, Chirac described the situation in 1996:

For some time, the atmosphere has been detestable within the majority (…). The Prime Minister is facing criticism from all quarters (…). (Chirac, 2011, 191)

Out of solidarity and friendship, the President provided unfailing support to his Prime Minister even though he admitted that Alain Juppé “could sometimes lack flexibility and impartiality in the exercise of power” (Chirac, 2011, 194). Juppé’s position was weakened very early, in June 1995, by the Paris City Hall housing affair, and later by his removal, in August of that year, of the Minister of Economy and Finance, Alain Madelin, who had been one of Chirac’s great supporters during the presidential campaign, as well as by the dismissal, in November, of nine out of the twelve women in his government during a reshuffle. But his image was even further affected by the social crisis caused by the vast plan, announced in mid-November 1995, to reform the financing of the social security system, civil service pensions and special pension schemes. France was paralysed for several weeks by the most massive strikes since 1968. The government withdrew its last two projects on December 15 and voted on the first on the 20th.

The majority, including some RPR MPs, such as Pasqua and Séguin, did not hold back in criticising Juppé and his entourage, the “techno-Juppeists”. In the fall of 1996, Pasqua spoke to the National Council of the RPR about the “discomfiture of power” (Le Monde, November 5). Jean-Pierre Soisson, a former minister of Giscard d’Estaing and Mitterrand, remembers:

The deputies want to get rid of Juppé. Jacques Chirac is faced with a choice: change the government or dissolve it. He thinks that Juppé is the best and that no Prime Minister would do better than him. He therefore follows Villepin and dissolves the National Assembly on 21 April 1997. (Soisson, 2015, 213)

The dissolution was not a surprise because the idea had been germinating, for several months, in the minds of many deputies. It was also entertained in the entourage of the President of the Republic, in particular by the Secretary General of the Élysée, Dominique de Villepin, and the chief of staff to the Prime Minister, Maurice Gourdault-Montagne. At first dismissed by the President, this idea spread at the end of March and Chirac ultimately resolved to carry it through. After a lunch at Matignon on 3 April, the journalist Michèle Cotta noted: “It would seem that out of the ‘three buttons’ – an expression that left its mark on me – Jacques Chirac chose to press this one: dissolution” (Cotta, 2009, 906). This dissolution, the fifth since 1958, represented, for three reasons, a break in the history of the Fifth Republic.

Even before it was ordered, it aroused strong opposition on the grounds of what the Gaullist jurist Pierre Mazeaud calls “the jurisprudence of the Fifth Republic”. This stipulates that a dissolution may occur in one of two situations:

Either a crisis between the executive and the people, as in 1962 and 1968, or a crisis between the executive and the legislature, as in 1981 and 1988. (Cotta, 2009, 911)

However, the solution reached in 1997 appears to have been a “dissolution of comfort”, according to Laurent Fabius. The President of the Republic justified it as follows: giving the floor back to the people so that they can decide on the changes to be made over the next five years and deal with the next major stages of European construction, including the transition to the single currency. In his memoirs, Chirac admitted having doubted “that he knew how to find the right words to convince our compatriots”. Indeed, the dissolution ended in a bitter setback for the majority in the legislative elections of May 25 and June 1: the loss of 224 seats (the RPR only had 139 seats left, i.e. −118 and the UDF 109 i.e. −106) and a victory for the “plural left” (275 seats for the PS i.e. +218, 37 for the PCF i.e. +14 and 8 for the ecologists, i.e. +8). For the first time, the Greens (les Verts) had entered the government. This election was characterised by a “surprise vote” (Sirinelli, 2008, 93), in terms of both the left’s ability to recover from its heavy defeat in 1993 by bringing together five parties (PS, PCF, Greens, Radical Left Party, Citizens’ Movement) and the magnitude of the result. The failure of the dissolution plunged the right into a deep crisis, which mainly affected the RPR.

The Longest Cohabitation: The End of the “Republican Monarchy”?

The logical consequence of this failed dissolution and the change of majority was a new cohabitation. Considering its duration, five years, it became the longest and covered most of the presidential term, with the Socialist Lionel Jospin as Prime Minister. By July 2023, it was also the most recent cohabitation. Another point of novelty would be that unlike the cohabitations of 1986–1988 and 1993–1995, the President of the Republic belonged to the right and the Prime Minister, like his majority, to the left. No head of state since 1958 had found himself so weakened after only two years in office.

Finally, the last major effect of the dissolution, unpredictable at that time, is that Article 12 of the Constitution, which made it possible, has not been used to this day. The changing of the electoral calendar, which places the legislative elections after the presidential election, minimises the likelihood of a dissolution to exceptional situations such as the resignation or death of the President of the Republic. Moreover, the memory of the 1997 dissolution is still alive in the political world. It is painful because the previous returns of the deputies to the voters (1962–1968–1981–1988) had fulfilled the Presidents’ objectives to achieve large majorities, except, of course, in 1988, when the majority was only relative.

Does this cohabitation mark the end of the “republican monarch”? It certainly diminishes the power of the head of state, for at least in matters of foreign and defence policies it must be shared with the head of the government, who is in charge of the domestic policy (Guigo, 2024). Such a distribution of power respects the letter of the Constitution, whose Article 20 stipulates that “The government determines and leads the policy of the Nation”. In practice, however, the 1997–2002 cohabitation leaned towards an interpretation of the Constitution that favoured the Prime Minister.

Tensions mounted quite quickly between the President of the Republic and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, appointed on 2 June 1997. On 14 July President Chirac criticised the government, which prompted Jospin’s response, based on the Constitution. In November, the two heads of the executive clashed again verbally. When Chirac warned against “the mirage of hazardous experiments” (20 November 1997), with reference to the bill to reduce the weekly working time to 35 hours, Matignon answered him by evoking “an experiment which began on 21 April 1997…in electoral matters, in connection with a dissolution” (Le Monde, 1997). Clashes on matters of foreign policy were frequent over the years, especially concerning European affairs that affected both international and domestic politics. Some examples include the Prime Minister’s refusal to allow France’s return to the integrated command of NATO (1997), his condemnation of the terrorist actions against Israel (2000) and his denial of permission for American planes to fly over its airspace after the attacks of 11 September 2001.

Despite some dissonance in the plural left, on immigration, for example, in January 1999 the Prime Minister reinforced the unity of the majority, as opposed to the “fragmentation” of the right (Le Monde, 1999). In August 2000, the resignation of the Minister of the Interior, Jean-Pierre Chevènement (Citizens’ Movement), who had disagreed with the Matignon Process on Corsica initiated by Lionel Jospin, weakened the government, especially since, on 4 September 2001, the former minister had announced his candidacy in the presidential election. Corsica’s political future was one of the topics that most severely strained the cohabitation, already battered by the November 2000 disagreement between the Élysée and Matignon on the ban on meat and bone meal. This urged Chirac to write in his memoirs that “Our relations will no longer be the same; because of this affair, it seems that we have been pushed to the limits of cohabitation” (Chirac, 2011, 285). Disputes over the policy to be pursued in Corsica reached a peak in February 2001. On the 21st, Jospin reminded the head of state of “twenty-five years of repression without dialogue and of arrangements without transparency” in Corsica, while Chirac, in a TV statement, called for Parliament’s “wisdom” to “amend” the government’s text and make it “constitutional”.

Cohabitation was not limited to the tensions between the Élysée and Matignon or between the majority and the opposition in Parliament. Thus, several major bills were passed by Congress on 28 June 1999. Parity was introduced by amending Article 3 of the Constitution: “the law promotes equal access of women and men to electoral mandates and function electives”. The two heads of the executive agreed on two reforms that were to have the most profound consequences for the functioning of the institutions: the shortening of the presidential mandate and the inversion of the electoral calendar in 2002.

The replacement of the seven-year term by the five-year term was not a new idea. President Pompidou had already considered it in 1973 but gave it up because he did not have a sufficient majority in Congress. In May 2000, the former President of the Republic, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, tabled a constitutional bill reducing the duration of the presidential mandate to five years, renewable only once. It was an idea endorsed by the programmes of the Socialist Party and the plural left. He asked the Prime Minister to put it on the Parliament’s agenda for rapid adoption. The Elysée announced that Chirac had been “thinking” about the issue and eventually agreed on the five-year term, which the public opinion also supported. The President announced that he would consult the French people by referendum about this reform. Like in 1973, many objections were raised, in particular among Gaullists of every generation: Pierre Lefranc saw in it “a profound alteration of the spirit of the Constitution of the Fifth Republic”, Pasqua denounced it as “a circumstantial reform”, and Séguin described the head of state as a “burglar” of institutions (Le Monde, June 2000). In June, Parliament voted, by a very large majority (466 votes vs. 28 in the National Assembly, 228 vs. 34 in the Senate), to pass the draft constitutional law on the five-year term. On 24 September 2000, the five-year term was adopted by 73.21% of the votes in the national referendum. But the blank or null vote (16.09%) and abstention rates (69.81%) had reached record levels for national elections.

The first proposal to modify the electoral calendar predates the five-year term. On 24 September 1999, François Bayrou, president of the UDF, proposed the extension of the term in office of the incumbent deputies by a few weeks, so that, in 2002, the presidential election would precede the legislative elections. In the fall of 2000, several professors of public law, including Georges Vedel, pronounced themselves against the “upside down vote” in Le Monde, in other words, against electing, in 2002, the deputies first and then the President. On 18 November, two former Prime Ministers, Raymond Barre (close to the UDF) and Michel Rocard (PS), published in Le Monde a text entitled “Voter la tête à l'endroit”. Their arguments were similar to those of the jurists, estimating that “the current order of the elections planned for 2002, which is the result of an unfortunate coincidence, is absurd and perilous”. Several parties—the radical left party, the PS and the UDF—and various personalities—such as Jean-Pierre Chevènement—spoke in favour of a reversal of the calendar. Finally, despite President Chirac’s reservations, on 24 April 2001 the National Assembly voted, by a large majority (308 votes for, 251 against), the inversion of the electoral calendar, which was validated, in May, by the Constitutional Council.

Historians and political scientists have interpreted the balance sheet of the long cohabitation in different ways. Jean-François Sirinelli considers that the “institutions were profoundly weakened” (Sirinelli, 2008, 95), while Gilles Richard believes that “the Fifth Republic emerges strengthened from these experiments” (Garrigues et al., 2010, 140). The difference in judgement varies depending on the scholar’s views on the “republican monarchy”. Cohabitation partially called it into question but, as Bastien François writes:

even if the cohabiting President of the Republic is reduced to a sort of tribune and loses his de facto, direct influence on the daily functioning of the government, the weight of the presidentialist reading of the regime remains considerable. (Garrigues et al., 2008, 379)

For others, cohabitation marked a return to the strict application of the constitutional text to delimit the powers of the two heads of the executive and was a sign of the regime’s ability to adapt. Whatever the interpretation, President Chirac did not emerge unscathed from these five years. Lionel Jospin painted a negative picture of the cohabitation and perhaps more broadly of institutions under the Fifth Republic:

To be effective and maintain its legitimacy, any executive power must combine two qualities: unity and responsibility. Our executive lacks both. It does not have the necessary unity because the relationship between the President of the Republic and the Prime Minister constantly oscillates between conflict, which exhausts their energy, and submission, which prevents them from fulfilling their roles. (Jospin, 2005, 195–196)

But the weakening of the President was not due only to cohabitation. There were worsening internal rifts within the right, in the party from which the President originated, the RPR. Several “affairs” personally affected Chirac and the regime itself was contested when the project for the Sixth Republic was presented by the Socialist Arnaud Montebourg.

The right-wing parties, much tested by their electoral rout in the spring of 1997, saw their internal differences worsen and sometimes reach breaking point. The dissidents of the RPR, Charles Pasqua, and of the UDF, Philippe de Villiers, who had been engaged in a fight for sovereignty since the referendum on the Maastricht Treaty, united their forces and presented a joint list of candidates in the European elections of 13 June 1999, under the name “Rally for France and for the Independence of Europe” (RPF-IE). While the right was still feeble compared to the legislative elections of 1997 and the European elections of 1994, the score of the RPF-IE list sent shockwaves in the press and was dubbed an “earthquake” for the right by Le Monde. With 13.05% of the votes cast, the Pasqua-de Villiers alliance came ahead of the RPR-DL group led by Nicolas Sarkozy and Alain Madelin (12.82%) and François Bayrou’s UDF (9.28%). The effects were immediate. Pasqua announced the launch of a new movement, the Rassemblement pour la France (RPF), declaring that “what happened in the RPR was no longer his concern”. Séguin believed that France was experiencing “an institutional problem” with a “weakened presidency”.

The RPF-IE, temporarily uniting Philippe de Villiers and Pasqua, was officially created on 21 November and published a charter to re-found the Fifth Republic. In view of the presidential election of 2002, initiatives were taken to unite the right. The Elysée was indirectly involved in the manoeuvre via Jérôme Monod, Chirac’s political adviser and one of the founders of the RPR (Lachaise, 2003, 1224). Thus, in November 2000, 364 opposition parliamentarians (RPR-UDF-DL) signed a call for unity that was published in Le Figaro. The call was meant to regroup all the right-wing factions under the leadership of the President of the Republic in 2002. A step was taken in April 2001, with the creation of the “Union in Motion” (UEM). Numerous people were opposed to the idea of “a single party”, including François Bayrou, Philippe Séguin and Michèle Alliot-Marie, the new president of the RPR as of December 1999. Chirac ended up having the UEM programme ratified in February 2002, during a national convention in Toulouse, where the only discordant voice belonged to François Bayrou, who was opposed to the creation of a “party of the President” and pled for “a partnership between the right and the centre”. The union was only partially achieved. In the first round of the presidential election, on 21 April 2002, Chirac was supported by the UEM, in other words, by most of the right-wing parties, even though he ran against other candidates from the right, such as François Bayrou, Alain Madelin and Christine Boutin. Moreover, the candidature of Jean-Pierre Chevènement received the support of historical Gaullists and sovereigntists from the RPF-IE (Lachaise, 2022, 195). Chirac did not, however, have to face the candidature of Pasqua (29 January), who had been pressing for a re-legitimation of the “presidential function” and denouncing “the decay of the state” (Le Monde, 29 January 2002) but had failed to obtain the required 500 endorsements.

The weakening of President Chirac was also caused by the “affairs” in which he was implicated. Le Canard enchaîné revealed, in April 1999, that the RPR’s permanent staff had been hired by the City of Paris and by private companies between 1990 and 1995, when Chirac was mayor. That led to a judicial inquiry into the fictitious jobs of the Paris Town Hall that was to last for many years. In September and then December 2000, the name of the President was cited in the case of the public housing contracts awarded by the City of Paris. François Bayrou spoke of a “moral and political crisis”, which the President of the Republic denied, stating he would ignore everything and claiming that the indictment of his former collaborator and minister, Michel Roussin, was “a judicial show”. Requests for reforming the status of the Head of State so that he could stand trial for wrongdoings committed prior to his election came from the left and the right, in particular from Alain Madelin (Démocratie Libérale, DL) and François Bayrou (UDF). In July 2001, the Paris prosecutor accused the President of having used secret funds for private trips he undertook as the mayor of Paris. Chirac refused any summons (“the President of the Republic is not a citizen like all others”) and the right denounced the “destabilisation” campaign that was waged against the head of state.

This political context contributed to relaunching the debate on the regime of the Fifth Republic. Following in the footsteps of other political personalities from various backgrounds, such as the ecologist Brice Lalonde in 1981, Simone Veil in 1989, the Socialists Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Marie-Noëlle Lienemann, and Julien Dray, the young Socialist deputy Arnaud Montebourg, elected in 1997, announced the creation of a Convention for the Sixth Republic in April 2001. He explained that “Loosened, immobile, almost anachronistic, our political technostructure clings to what remains of ‘its’ Fifth Republic”. He recommended the election of the head of state by a Congress composed of the two parliamentary assemblies and the attribution of all executive power to the Prime Minister. This challenge to the quinto-republican model remains very much in the minority within the Socialist Party. It was certainly redolent of the old criticisms levelled by the left against the regime born in 1958, including those voiced by François Mitterrand in The permanent coup d’Etat (1964) and in the Common programme of the left (1972), but it contrasted with the practice of President Mitterrand, who had insinuated himself perfectly into the institutions of the Fifth Republic by repeatedly using the argument that “We should stick to the text of the Constitution. Nothing more, nothing less” (Lachaise, 2019). In 2005, Arnaud Montebourg resumed and adapted his initial idea in a book he wrote together with the political scientist Bastien François, The Constitution of the Sixth Republic: reconciling the French with democracy.

The President of the Republic, Jacques Chirac, and the Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, announced their candidatures for the presidential election a few days apart, one on 11 February 2002 and the other on 20 February. This was the second time in the history of the Fifth Republic—and the latest to this day—that the two heads of the executive met face to face in an electoral battle. The result turned out to be totally different from 1988, when President Mitterrand had been well ahead of Prime Minister Chirac (34.09% against 19.94%). 21 April 2002 marked a political earthquake. Chirac, in the lead, won a mere 19.88% of the votes and Lionel Jospin came only in third position (16.18%), with 194,600 votes behind Jean-Marie Le Pen (National Front).

The shock was threefold: the elimination of the outgoing Prime Minister who, despite being a favourite in the polls, announced his political retirement the evening of the first round of the presidential election; the advancement to the second round, for the first time since the election of the President of the Republic by direct universal suffrage, of the leader of a far-right party; finally, the rather poor score of the incumbent president, barely higher than that of his first unsuccessful attempt, in 1981 (18%).

Jacques Chirac refused to engage in a debate with Jean-Marie Le Pen because “there is no possible transaction in the face of intolerance and hatred”. The UEM was replaced on 23 April by the Union for the Presidential Majority (UMP), still incomplete since François Bayrou, Alain Madelin and Charles Pasqua had refused to join it. Many demonstrations against the far right were organised between the two rounds of the election. The most important was that of 1 May, when more than 1.5 million people marched in Paris and in the provinces to “block” extremism. This civic mobilisation allowed for the re-election of Chirac, on 5 May, with 82.21% of the votes against Jean-Marie Le Pen (17.79%), even if much of the left-wing electorate voted for the incumbent President by “covering their noses”.

The Chirac Quinquennium: The Return to Presidential Pre-eminence?

A Loyal Prime Minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin and a Strong Majority in Parliament

On the evening of his re-election, Chirac declared that he understood the message of the French for “the Republic to live”, for the “nation to come together” and for “politics to change”. The appointment of the Prime Minister was a priority for the re-elected head of state. Several names were mentioned for Matignon, including Nicolas Sarkozy, who was the favourite in the polls but was very quickly dismissed by the Élysée. Eventually, Chirac chose Jean-Pierre Raffarin, little known but not without political capital. He had been president of the Poitou–Charentes region since 1988 and was a former European MP, a senator since 1995, a former minister of the Juppé government, a former secretary general of the UDF and one of the organisers of the UEM/UMP. A former Giscardian, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, had been loyal to Chirac since 1997, when he committed himself to ensuring the President’s re-election. Much like at the start of the previous mandate, loyalty was bound to be privileged, especially at the end of a long cohabitation and after the shock of 21 April. By choosing a provincial, the Head of State hoped to show his interest in bringing people together and intended, in the words of Jean-Pierre Raffarin, “to regain proximity to the real country, get out of the Parisian bastions, renew the dialogue with the living forces and the populations who feel neglected” (Raffarin, 2012, 249).

Obviously, Jean-Pierre Raffarin could not usher in the openness that had been hoped for by many after the second round of the presidential election. Jacques Chirac explained the reasons for his choice:

Why didn’t I immediately consider forming a government of national unity? I simply did not do it and it was probably a mistake with regard to the national unity that I was the guarantor of (…). For the sake of finding, after a long cohabitation, more clarity and efficiency in the government’s action (…). This government of national unity would also pose an obvious danger to our democracy: that of making the National Front appear as the only force of alternation. (Chirac, 2011, 352)

The head of state did not say he had chosen a premier pertaining to the category of “people who are there to serve their Number 1, who lack the ambition to be Number 1 or replace Number 1”, according to the formula of Jean-Pierre Raffarin (Guigo & Pezé, 2023). The choice of the new Prime Minister aroused, and continues to this day to elicit, comments on the President’s ambition to regain all his power. Nicolas Sarkozy, disappointed that he had not been chosen, described Jean-Pierre Raffarin as a “third knife” and was exasperated by “his inability to think outside the box Jacques Chirac put him in” (Sarkozy, 2019). A scholar talked about Chirac’s bliss to have found in Raffarin a Prime Minister who was as comfortable as a pair of Charente slippers! (Rouart, 2005, 119).

A loyal Prime Minister was not enough to help him retrieve his powers, so the President needed a majority in the National Assembly. He obtained it during the legislative elections of 9 and 16 June, but voting abstention reached a record level under the Fifth Republic at that time (35.62%). The “blue wave” gave the UMP alone 365 deputies (nearly two-thirds) and the entire right and centre 401 seats (29 UDF, 8 various right-wing politicians). The National Front, in clear decline compared to its score of 1997 and 2002, did not obtain any seats. The left suffered a severe defeat, with only 141 elected Socialists (instead of 275 in 1997), 21 communists (against 37) and 3 ecologists (compared to 8). In the Senate, the UMP group, formed in December 2002, held an absolute majority with 177 seats (94 from the RPR group, 50 independent Republicans, 29 centrists and 4 European Democratic and Social Rally members) out of 348 (Conord, 2016, 150). Jean-Pierre Raffarin was confirmed at Matignon. He considered that he and the President were shields to one another. He saw himself serving as a shield against Parliament, the labour unions, the social partners, while the Head of State was a shield for the Prime Minister “because attacking the Prime Minister was like attacking the President” (Guigo & Pezé, 2023). Jacques Chirac regained all his power in matters of foreign and defence policy, leaving the economic and social affairs to Jean-Pierre Raffarin.

Jacques Chirac Facing the Presidential Ambitions of Nicolas Sarkozy and Dominique de Villepin

In 2002, the re-elected President imposed three ministers to Jean-Pierre Raffarin, “in shared custody” (Raffarin, 2012, 255). Nicolas Sarkozy received the vast portfolio of the Interior, Public Security and Local Freedoms. Dominique de Villepin inherited the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Michèle Alliot-Marie was appointed Minister of Defence. If de Villepin, former secretary general of the Élysée, and Alliot-Marie, former minister and president of the RPR, were not yet would-be Prime Ministers, things were different in the case of Nicolas Sarkozy. Disappointed to have been relegated by Chirac to a second position in the government, the new minister did his utmost to succeed, particularly in the sensitive area of security. He engaged in intense communication and imposed himself in the media, never losing sight of his ambitions. Jean-Pierre Raffarin discussed these ambitions in the following terms: “It is very difficult to have someone who challenges Number 1 while serving as Number 2 in the government” (Guigo & Pezé, 2023).

Aside from a brief stint at the Ministry of the Economy, Finance and Industry from 31 March to 29 November 2004, Nicolas Sarkozy remained at the helm of the Ministry of the Interior throughout the five-year term. Aware of the importance that security issues had taken during the presidential campaign and convinced that France was the victim of “security laxity”, Nicolas Sarkozy fought against insecurity and adopted a firm immigration policy, making it a priority of his ministerial activity. He hoped to attract the part of the electorate that had voted for the National Front in 2002 and did not hesitate to confront Jean-Marie Le Pen in a televised debate, which Chirac had refused to attend during the in-between rounds. He went into the field, made laws (2003, 2005, 2007) and launched a great number of watchwords designed to shock the public opinion: “waging war on thugs”, “defending the France of the forgotten ones” and mocking the “human-rightists” (2002). During the 2005 crisis in the suburbs, he went one step further by stating that “we are going to clean the city with the Kärcher” and get rid of “scum”. While these remarks and the security measures he took aroused the left’s strong opposition, the polls were more and more favourable to the minister over the years. At the same time, Sarkozy consolidated his position and was elected president of the UMP by an overwhelming majority, replacing Alain Juppé, in November 2004.

In November 2003, Sarkozy replied to the question: “When you shave in the morning (…), do you ever think of the presidential election?” by saying “Not just when I shave”. The minister had every reason to be satisfied. The programme broke audience records and, as the historian Christian Delporte wrote, “The path is cleared for Sarkomania” (Delporte, 2012, 362). After the majority’s serious electoral failure during the regional elections of March 2004 (24 out of 26 regions were lost), Chirac kept Jean-Pierre Raffarin at Matignon even though his councillors advised him to replace him with Nicolas Sarkozy. The reshuffle, which brought Nicolas Sarkozy to the Ministry of the Economy, was not enough for the government to regain the confidence of the French citizens. Besides its negative impact on the Prime Minister’s authority, Sarkozy’s ambitious rise was causing great tension with the President of the Republic. The French received a clear illustration of that tension on 14 July 2004, when, questioned about his minister, Chirac declared curtly: “I decide, he executes”. Relations at the highest state level deteriorated even further. After the failure of the referendum on the European Constitutional Treaty in May 2005, Chirac once again refused to appoint Sarkozy as Prime Minister, and chose Michèle Alliot-Marie, an experienced politician who was also the new president of the RPR, as Minister of Defence. In his memoirs, Chirac admitted that it was a “comfort solution” but “not probably the sign of the new beginnings expected by the French people (Chirac, 2011, 534). The weakening of the outgoing Prime Minister went hand in hand with Chirac’s clear lack of popularity (62% of the French no longer trusted him). At the very last moment, Dominique de Villepin, a close collaborator of the President’s during the seven-year term who had succeeded Sarkozy at the Ministry of the Interior and later became a brilliant Minister of Foreign Affairs, was chosen by Chirac for Matignon. On 31 May 2005, the President simultaneously announced the appointments of Dominique de Villepin and Sarkozy, who returned to the Ministry of the Interior and his secondary rank. “Peace of mind will never be the same between the two big, troubled people, full of fire, blood and impatience”, as Jean-Pierre Raffarin wrote (Rouart, 2005, 127).

After the failure of the Referendum on the European Constitutional Treaty, the President of the Republic suffered a stroke on 2 September. While it did not leave serious sequelae, this weakened him more and transformed his image in the eyes of many. Even though he only announced in March 2007 to the French that he would not run for a second five-year term, this was quite clear to the public opinion and the political world. Just like in the aftermath of May 1968 in the case of De Gaulle, Chirac’s succession was well under way within the right-wing, pitting two contenders against one another: the Prime Minister and his Number 2. The atmosphere was “appalling”, in the words of Nicolas Sarkozy, who did his utmost to advance his candidature, well before it became official, on 30 November 2006, not least by publishing and promoting a book, Témoignages (Testimony), in July 2006.

In the competition against Dominique de Villepin, Sarkozy benefited from the legitimacy imparted by his long experience as an elected official and his popularity in the UMP. On the other hand, the Prime Minister had never faced universal suffrage. The battle between them took various forms. At the very least, their disagreements about the measures to be taken—on immigration, the special pension schemes, the fight against delinquency—were often expressed publicly in the autumn of 2006. However, the strongest tensions of the last two years of the quinquennium revolved around the October 2005 crisis of the suburbs, caused by the law on the first employment contract (CPE) for young people under 26, and the Clearstream affair. When the suburbs of the Paris conurbation burst into flames, the Prime Minister reinstated the state of emergency law adopted at the beginning of the Algerian war, in 1955. A few months later, the CPE deregulated restrictions on hiring. This immediately ignited strong trade union and political opposition and was followed by major protests, strikes and university blockades. On 28 March 2006, the massive mobilisation—more than one million people—exceeded that of 1995 against the Juppé Plan. Sarkozy publicly asked for the withdrawal of the CPE bill. The President and the Prime Minister finally decided to promulgate the law voted by Parliament but not to apply it. Still, their popularity rating (29%) was at its lowest while that of the Minister of the Interior was increasing. Later, Sarkozy wrote that “the CPE project was stillborn, as were the presidential ambitions of Dominique de Villepin” (Sarkozy, 2019, 292). The Clearstream affair broke out at the end of April 2006 but had its origins in 2004. Sarkozy’s name was invoked, among others, in relation to a money-laundering scheme around Clearstream, a Luxembourg-based banking compensation fund. Dominique de Villepin and, indirectly, Jacques Chirac were accused of starting this rumour. Philippe Bas, former Secretary General of the Élysée, referred to this episode as “politics at gunpoint” and as “a confrontation between these two men of power that has reached an unprecedented intensity in the History of the Republic” (Bas, 2012, 369).

The end of Chirac’s five-year term took on the appearance of a twilight. His authority was challenged even inside his own political family, in particular by Sarkozy who, to further convince the public of his dynamic ability to embody renewal, associated the President with the “lazy kings”. A year before the presidential election, the journalist Franz-Olivier Giesbert wrote without inhibitions about the President who “over the years, has become an old habit, like the night watchman of a retirement house who plods, taking tired steps, to turn off the lights” (Giesbert, 2006, 400).

Ultimately, it was neither the reduction of the presidential term, nor the inversion of the electoral calendar that weakened the head of state during the first five-year term in the history of the Fifth Republic. What debilitated him were, on the one hand, several failed successive elections (the regional ones in 2004 and the lost referendum in 2005) and, on the other hand, “the Élysée temptation”: two major figures of the five-year term, Nicolas Sarkozy and Dominique de Villepin, could not resist, from very early on, playing “the war of sons” against an aging President. The first of the two “sons”, winner of the 2007 presidential election, later claimed to have…

[…] anticipated for a long time the consequences of the five-year term and of the concomitance of presidential and legislative elections on the Prime Minister’s role. A diarchy at the top of the state over such a short period is no longer necessary. The President is elected, the Prime Minister is appointed, there can be no ambiguity about who has legitimate power, in any case, outside the period of cohabitation. From this point of view, we are very far from the letter of the Constitution of the Fifth Republic (…). With the introduction of the five-year term and the rule that legislative elections should come right after the presidential elections, the Prime Minister’s role has changed. He now needs to resign himself to enforcing the President’s policy. (Sarkozy, 2019, 311)

In 2007, this was President Sarkozy’s attitude towards his Prime Minister François Fillon, whom he described as a “collaborator”. But, like any attitude, this could change. The successors of Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy at the Élysée have certainly proved it. The question of the “hyper-presidency” is one of the subjects that divide the defenders of the institutions of the Fifth Republic and the partisans of a Sixth Republic: while the former insist on the adaptability of the constitution as shown by the cohabitation, the latter share the opinion of political scientist Delphine Dulong, according to whom,

The Fifth Republic is out of breath, and the reforms undertaken since 2000 to plug the breaches will not make it possible to stave off the general demobilisation and political power’s growing lack of credibility. (Dulong, 2021, 368)

Conclusions

Jacques Chirac’s presidency was the second longest during the Fifth Republic, after François Mitterrand’s. The contrast between his two mandates was even more salient than the one between the two terms of his predecessor. Chirac’s first term in office was brought alternation to the Élysée after fourteen years of Socialist Presidency, but also a rapid defeat in the legislative elections of 1997, resulting in a new cohabitation. Like François Mitterrand before, Jacques Chirac fought to keep his constitutional powers against the offensive of the government led by the Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, who naturally wanted to concentrate decision-making in the hands of the legislature, in which he had a stable but composite majority (“la gauche plurielle”—the plural left). Following the example of his illustrious direct predecessor, Chirac tried to weaken and discredit the parliamentary majority, while keeping the appearance of republican inter-institutional collaboration. This fuelled the image of a much smoother cohabitation than the precedent ones, although it ended in a disastrous outcome for the Socialist Party, whose candidate was unable to reach the second round of the 2002 presidential elections.

Chirac’s second mandate was the first five-year term in the history of the French Fifth Republic, reduced from the initial seven-year one under the 2000 constitutional reform. After a large victory during the 2002 legislative elections, when voters wanted to give a wide majority to the re-elected President in order to prevent the advancement of the far right, the President appeared now as the real leader of the majority. This contrasted with the tradition inaugurated by General de Gaulle in 1958, according to which the President needed to play a more distant leadership role. This trend was to be reinforced by Chirac’s successor, Nicolas Sarkozy, whose early presidential ambitions pushed him to distance himself from the acting President and to progressively produce a de facto scission within the centre-right majority. This led to the progressive marginalisation of an increasingly out-of-hand head of state, who ended up inevitably accepting the primacy of the next would-be candidate. Thus, Chirac’s second term marked the transformation of the President into an informal albeit actual leader of the parliamentary majority—a situation that may well have been inevitable, given the shortened presidential mandate and the correlation between the calendars of the presidential and legislative elections.