When institutions stop working:
France is experiencing its fifth government crisis in less than two years. Sébastien Lecornu, just appointed prime minister, leads an executive that is essentially identical to François Bayrou's, which fell after just three months. Same ministers, same fragile majority, same impossible mission: approve a budget requiring €44 billion in cuts when parliament is controlled by oppositions that built their consensus precisely by promising not to cut anything.
It looks like yet another European political soap opera. But if you know how to look beyond the headlines, what's happening in France is a textbook case of what occurs when a system's institutional architecture enters irreversible conflict with the political reality it's supposed to govern. And it's a pattern that doesn't just concern Paris - you'll see it repeat, with local variations, in all Western democracies that haven't yet understood that the world they were designed for no longer exists.
The problem is architectural, not political
France's Fifth Republic was designed by Charles de Gaulle in 1958 with a crystal-clear objective: end the chronic instability of the Fourth Republic, where fragile governments fell every few months because no one ever had a solid majority. The solution? A strong president, directly elected, with powers of appointment and parliamentary dissolution. A system built to ensure there was always a clear winner, a governing majority, what the French call the "fait majoritaire."
The entire institutional design starts from this assumption: the system is bipolar. Center-right versus center-left, with variations on the theme, but always two blocks that alternate. In this context, tools like Article 49.3 of the Constitution - which allows the government to pass a law without a vote unless it's voted out - work magnificently. They're credible deterrents. "You want to block this law? Fine, but then you need the courage and the numbers to bring down the government." And since no one ever really had them, the mechanism guaranteed stability.
But today? France has three blocks of nearly equal size that hate each other. The New Popular Front (radical left) with 178 seats, Ensemble (Macron's center) with 150, and the National Rally (radical right) with 142. No one can govern alone. But everyone can prevent others from doing so.
It's what the document I analyzed perfectly calls the "negative majority": there's no majority to build anything, but there's always a majority to destroy. The institutional architecture keeps desperately searching for that clear winner who no longer exists, while political reality has produced a stable tripolar equilibrium. Result: systemic paralysis.
When medicine becomes poison
Article 49.3 is a fascinating case of how a tool designed to solve one problem ends up aggravating it when context changes. Élisabeth Borne, prime minister before Bayrou, used it 23 times during her tenure. It became routine, the only way to pass anything in a fragmented parliament.
But there's a side effect no one anticipated: by normalizing the use of 49.3, you've desensitized the oppositions to the threat of no-confidence. The first time you use it, it's a credible bluff. "Careful, if you vote against, the government falls and we go to new elections - do you really want to risk that?" But if you use it every month, it's no longer a bluff. It's just the normal way of doing things. And then the oppositions, instead of being intimidated, start organizing.
Michel Barnier, Bayrou's predecessor, fell exactly this way. He used 49.3 on the Social Security budget, and for the first time in Fifth Republic history, the oppositions had the numbers to actually vote him out. 364 votes against. A historic event that demonstrated two things: first, that the "negative majority" exists and is operational. Second, that the tool designed to protect the government has become the detonator that blows it up.
Sébastien Lecornu learned the lesson and promised not to use 49.3. Which means he now has to beg for votes in a National Assembly where three out of four deputies would like to see him fall. He's disarmed before even starting.
The game theory of obstructionism
Now, the interesting question: why do the oppositions behave this way? Why do La France Insoumise and the National Rally, who are ideologically at opposite poles, vote together to bring down every government Macron proposes?
The answer lies in pure game theory. If you're a radical opposition leader - Jean-Luc Mélenchon on the left, Jordan Bardella on the right - which strategy maximizes your payoff for the 2027 presidential elections?
Option A: You collaborate with Macron. You negotiate, compromise, allow the government to govern. Risk: your voters see you as complicit with the system they hate. You lose credibility, your block fragments, you arrive at the presidential elections weakened.
Option B: You do total obstructionism. You bring down every government. You demonstrate that the "center" is impotent, that it can't govern, that Macronism is finished. You present yourself as the only real alternative, the one that didn't compromise its principles. Result: you maximize your political capital for 2027.
The choice is obvious. Obstructionism isn't childish or irresponsible - it's perfectly rational given the incentive system. The problem isn't that politicians are bad or immature. The problem is that the rules of the game produce this behavior as the dominant equilibrium.
And there's another level: French politics, like that of all contemporary Western democracies, is increasingly about identity performance rather than negotiation of interests. The three blocks aren't just different political positions - they're tribes that have built their identity in opposition to each other. Every compromise isn't seen as pragmatism, but as betrayal. When this happens, systems designed for compromise break down.
Les Républicains and the node that won't hold
There's one actor that deserves particular attention: Les Républicains, the former Gaullist party reduced to 39 deputies but paradoxically crucial. They're too few to govern alone, too ideologically different from Macronism to feel at home, but terrified of going into opposition because the National Rally would eat their entire electoral space.
Result? Half of them are in the government (Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau, Culture Minister Rachida Dati, others), the other half votes with the oppositions to bring down the government. It's what the document on the French crisis perfectly defines as an "internal cohabitation." A party that no longer knows who it is.
From a network architecture perspective, Les Républicains occupies a structural hole - it bridges the center and the right. In theory, this is a position of enormous power. Who controls a bridge controls the flow. But in practice, it's tearing them apart. Because when a network node doesn't decide which identity to maintain, it loses all its strategic utility. And risks imploding.
If Les Républicains fragments - and there are all the signs it might - the Lecornu government falls automatically. Without those 39 deputies, the numbers no longer work. And that's why Lecornu was chosen: he comes from the right, he's a Gaullist, his main mission isn't to govern, it's to hold Les Républicains together long enough to survive the budget vote.
The universal pattern
Now, the part that should really interest you: this isn't a French problem. It's the pattern that emerges when institutions designed for bipolarity meet the multipolar fragmentation of the 21st century.
You see it in Italy, where improbable coalition governments last because no one wants to go to elections that could go worse. You see it in the United States, where Congress is paralyzed and the federal government risks shutdown every year because moderates have disappeared and radicals on both sides prefer permanent war to compromise. You'll see it in Germany when the Greens, SPD, and liberals can no longer stay together and have to decide whether to ally with AfD or go to elections.
The pattern is always the same:
- Institutions that assume a bipolar system
- Political reality that produces multipolar fragmentation
- Electoral incentives that reward obstructionism over construction
- Tribal identities that replace pragmatic coalitions
- Actors' time horizons that shift from the present (governing today) to the future (winning tomorrow)
When all these elements align, you get paralysis. And paralysis self-reinforces, because each government crisis further weakens trust in the system, further radicalizes voters, and makes any compromise even more politically costly.
What will happen
The most probable scenario? France will muddle through until 2027. Lecornu will survive a few months, perhaps approving a budget so watered down as to be irrelevant, then he'll fall too. Macron will appoint another prime minister. The cycle will repeat. The entire legislature will become one long, chaotic electoral campaign for the presidential elections, with every parliamentary vote transformed into a mini-referendum on the future presidency.
No structural reform will be approved. The debt will continue to grow. Markets will start to worry. And in 2027 we'll probably have an apocalyptic presidential election between extreme right and extreme left, with the Macronist center imploding and disappearing.
To really solve the problem would require changing the institutional architecture. Moving to a parliamentary system that forces coalition formation before the vote. Modifying electoral law to incentivize aggregations. Rebuilding a political culture of compromise.
But none of these solutions is politically feasible because it would require current actors to renounce the advantages of the dysfunctional system. It's the classic second-order problem: to solve the crisis would require cooperation, but the crisis itself destroys every incentive to cooperate.
So we'll witness the collapse in slow motion. Not because French politicians are stupid or bad, but because the institutional game design inevitably produces this outcome. It's the result of forty years of center erosion, ideological polarization, social fragmentation that Fifth Republic institutions weren't designed to handle.
Clinical realism, not cynicism. It's just seeing patterns for what they are.