PAOLA PICIACCHIA 

Il primo ministro nella IV Repubblica francese tra le speranze dei costituenti e le difficoltà della prassi

N. 174

Summary - A weak position in French Constitutional Law since the III Republic, the Prime Minister in the IV Republic cannot find within the institutional asset a place and a role which, on the contrary in a parliamentary regime is supposed to be given, as the British experience had shown.

Forced to cope, from one side, with the notion of head of State, ancient and well rooted in the French mind, and on the other, with a Parliament jealous of its prerogatives and holder of sovereignty, the Prime Minister is suspended and divided between universal and particular, the vocation to strengthen its government authority and the strict link which is forced to establish with parties capable to weaken his powers and authority.

The evolution of the IV Republic has in fact shown the failure of the proceedings envisaged by the constituents in order to strengthen the executive when facing increasing cabinet crises and the difficulty of finding a cohesive and homogenous majority meant to support first the candidature and then the election of a given Prime Minister.

Beyond assessing the well known theories about the difficulty of exercising a true government leadership within a divided cabinet and the difficulty of adopting a programme by a compact majority, this fact accounts for the perspective arising from the analysis of the force ratios existing within the IV Republic between the President of the Republic and the Prime Minister on the one side and the President of the Republic and the National Assembly on the other. It also indicates that the French Prime Minister, under different pressures, has only limitedly found a way to impose his will and therefore played an active role in the constitutional dynamics. This, however, does not deny, in some cases, the role played by the Prime Minister in smoothing the strong Assembly suggestions of the French form of government of the IV Republic.