Are we heading towards cohabitation or a coalition?

The denouement is approaching in the search for a prime minister. Emmanuel Macron, who could make this appointment on Tuesday, is looking for a head of government who will not be subject to immediate censure in the National Assembly.

Emmanuel Macron will receive, on Monday, September 2, Bernard Cazeneuve, Xavier Bertrand, but also former presidents François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy. The appointment of a new tenant for Matignon seems imminent, but will it be a cohabitation or coalition Prime Minister? The head of state is looking for a bit of both.

At the Élysée, a neologism has even been invented to define this new “at the same time” : there “coalition”. On the one hand, Emmanuel Macron has decided not to appoint a member of the outgoing majority, a way of conceding that his camp has indeed lost the legislative elections. But on the other hand, he is urging this future Prime Minister to go beyond the limits of his camp to unite broadly, by opening up to other political sensibilities, including the Macronists.

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Can the executive be in a situation of cohabitation and find itself within the same coalition? Normally, no. When the legislative elections take place during the President’s term, a defeat of the outgoing majority leads to the appointment to Matignon of a Prime Minister from the winning camp, and therefore hostile to the Head of State. The two heads of the executive are forced to cohabit and the Head of Government has a very free hand under Article 20 of the Constitution which states: “the government determines and conducts the policy of the Nation.” We have already experienced it three times, with the cohabitations of Mitterrand-Chirac, Mitterrand-Balladur and then Chirac-Jospin, and it is this model that the leaders of the New Popular Front are demanding, accusing Emmanuel Macron of “coup de force” by refusing to comply with it.

This accusation is not justified. Of course, Emmanuel Macron still hopes not to see his main reforms unraveled by the future government, but it is not the good pleasure of the head of state that invites to mix cohabitation and coalition: it is the political situation. The Prime Minister is responsible to Parliament. In the absence of an absolute majority, the future appointee will therefore have to build a coalition, whether it is assumed and explicit, that is to say with ministers from the left, the right and the center. Or only implicit, that is to say by ensuring that the majority of these three blocs do not censure him. Whether the Prime Minister comes from the left, for example Bernard Cazeneuve, or from the right, like Xavier Bertrand, he will even necessarily have to ensure the support, or at least the indulgence, of the 166 deputies of the Macronist central bloc.