Prawne i polityczne uwarunkowania dymisji rządów we francuskiej praktyce ustrojowej okresu V Republiki
Legal and political factors of governments’ dismissals in the French political practice under the Fifth Republic

Summary/Abstract: The paper deals with legal and political factors affecting government dismissals during the Fifth Republic of France. The author draws attention to the role played by some characteristic properties of the French system of government, in which the government’s responsibility to the parliament (regulated in the constitution of 1958) is in practice supplemented with responsibility before the head of state (the latter type of political responsibility has not been anchored in the constitution itself). The analysis includes forty cabinets functioning in France from the late 1950s to the 2017 parliamentary elections. The successions of cabinets quite often took place for procedural reasons (not only after elections to the National Assembly, but also customarily after presidential ones). Decisions of this kind were also made by presidents themselves who — as actual leaders within the whole executive branch (outside periods of cohabitation) — were guided by their own political needs. As practice has shown, according to the logic of rationalised parliamentarism, the role of the parliamentary opposition was not significant in this respect. The same can be said about dismissals submitted by prime ministers who did not follow the previously expressed expectations of the head of state. It all leads to the conclusion that the durability of successively created governments was not very high, however this phenomenon resulted from completely different reasons than in the case of unstable cabinets functioning in non-rationalised parliamentary regimes (under the Third and Fourth Republics)

• Details
• Contents