Word: parliament
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Secondly, the austere and decisive Presidency of the Republic is more a theoretician's dream than a practical remedy. Should the "national arbiter" refuse to accept the resignation of a cabinet whenever the Premier has not been overthrown by a motion of no confidence, even though Parliament has made the Premier's life impossible, or should the President dissolve the Assembly whenever it has paralyzed the government, then a move which the President might interpret as a pure act of arbitration "designed to insure the normal functioning of the institutions" will inevitably become a hot political issue...
...arbiter will be dragged into a "political bickering." Dissolution might be of little help to him if the electorate sends the same men back to Parliament...
After a period of fights between the President and Parliament, the former consented to fade away, without ever using again most of his extensive powers. The final victory of Parliament, the only thoroughly representative organ elected by universal suffrage, is more likely than autocracy to come out of this Constitution. We would be back almost where we began...
...lack of a potential governing majority remains the crucial political problem. Without such a majority, cabinets will remain fragile, deprived of a firm basis in the electorate and more likely to find enemies than friends in Parliament. The wide gap between the political system, operating in an intellectual vacuum and an apathetic country has been one of the causes of the down-fall of the Fourth Republic. The present Constitution, by itself, does nothing to close this gap, except in so far as it provides for the possibility of occasional referendums...
...pressed for such a settlement have insisted on voting no, in order to protest against the coup d' Alger of May 13 and against the spirit of the Constitution, which they consider insufficiently democratic. They remain faithful to the old Republican tradition which associates democracy only with a sovereign Parliament...