| Horoscope |
|---|
|
|
 /en-03AFI-US_AFIParis_125x125/$file/US_AFIParis_125x125.gif)
|
| |
|
France Page |
Welcome to ElectionInfo.com's pages on France
Official Name: French Republic
Capital: Paris
Area: 551,500 square kilometres ( 212,935 square miles )
Major cities (Population)
Paris 2,200,000 (1995 estimate)
Marseille 807,726 (1990)
Toulouse 365,933 (1990)
Nice 345,674 (1990)
Strasbourg 255,937 (1990)
Nantes 252,029 (1990)
Bordeaux 213,274 (1990)
Montpellier 210,866 (1990)
Population: 57,981,000 (1995 estimate)
Population growth rate: 0.4 per cent (1990-1995 average)
Type of government: Republic
Independence: 486 (unified by Clovis)
Constitution
28 September 1958; amended in 1962 regarding presidential election, in 1992 to comply with the provisions of the European Union (EU) Maastricht Treaty, and in 1993 to tighten immigration laws
Voting Rights: Universal at age 18
Government
France has had an extensive written constitution since 1958. It provides for a strong president who is both head of state and executive head of government, and who is elected every seven years with a two-round ballot. The president is the commander in chief of the armed forces, appoints the prime minister (who must always come from the party with the most representatives in the National Assembly), and has the right to dissolve the Assembly and call new elections. The president does not have the power of veto, but does have extensive rights to rule by emergency decree in the event of a national crisis. The voting age is 18. The parliament has two houses. The National Assembly has 577 members who are elected for five-year terms. The Senate has 321 members, who serve nine-year terms; one third of members are elected every three years by a college of about 130,000 local councillors. There is a separate judicial branch. In a departure from tradition, some decentralization of government has been taking place.
Recent History
Algeria’s struggle for independence from France began in 1954. This rocked French society and politics in the 1950s, and leaders of the Fourth Republic—the post-World War II French government—yielded power to General Charles de Gaulle in an attempt to prevent a military coup d’état in France in 1958. De Gaulle, the hero of the French Resistance in World War II, soon oversaw the drafting of a new constitution that won approval in September 1958 and heralded the start of the Fifth Republic. De Gaulle was elected president of France in December of the same year. He successfully negotiated a settlement with Algeria that met with overwhelming popular approval in France, and Algeria achieved independence in 1962. This was a period of rapid decolonization, bringing the years of colonial wars to an end, and raising the economic challenge of reabsorbing hundreds of thousands of returning French settlers. De Gaulle devoted sizeable funds to the former colonies in order to maintain French influence abroad.
De Gaulle was re-elected president in 1965, his first election by universal suffrage. A period of apparent stability under his paternalistic rule ended in May 1968, when students’ and workers’ strikes, escalated dizzyingly and produced massive upheaval in France. Workplace and education reforms—including higher wages, improved working conditions, and more modernized and decentralized schools—reflected the significance of the strikes long after they had subsided.
De Gaulle stepped down in April 1969, after constitutional amendments which he had sponsored were rejected at the polls; he died in 1970. Georges Pompidou, of the Gaullist Union of Democrats for the Republic (UDR) party, was elected president in June 1969. After his unexpected death in 1974, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was elected, the first non-Gaullist president of the Fifth Republic.
François Mitterrand defeated Giscard in the elections of 1981, and Mitterrand’s Socialist Party (PS) won a majority in the National Assembly. During the following year, Mitterrand oversaw various social reforms, the nationalization of much of the economy, and made steps toward political decentralization. Yet in 1983-1984, faced with economic setbacks, the government changed tactics. Mitterrand and the Socialists met with increasing popular disapproval. This period saw the rise of the extreme right-wing National Front (FN), headed by Jean-Marie Le Pen. Le Pen’s xenophobic, anti-immigrant stance appealed to more and more voters as widespread unemployment and racial tensions worsened. Socialists lost their majority in the National Assembly in the 1986 elections.
Mitterrand regained his popularity in the subsequent years, however, and was re-elected in 1988. When he stepped down in 1995 after two terms, he had made a name for himself as a cultural benefactor as he had heavily subsidized the arts in Paris during his years in power. The Mitterrand years were also notable for a wide range of prime ministers, including two from rival party Rally for the Republic (RPR)—party founder Jacques Chirac (1986–1988) and Edouard Balladur (1993–1995). Mitterrand also appointed France’s first woman prime minister, Edith Cresson, in 1991. He died in 1996.
Jacques Chirac was elected president of France in 1995 in a close race divided among several candidates, including Le Pen, who won 15 percent of the vote. These results were further reinforced during local elections a month later. President Chirac soon encountered international criticism for resuming the French programme of underground nuclear tests in the South Pacific and called an end to them in January 1996. Prime Minister Alain Juppé became unpopular at home in 1995 and 1996 for implementing substantial austerity measures intended to prepare the French economy for the 1999 European Monetary Union. Such measures led to an upsurge of unrest by workers and students, which eventually paralyzed the country in December 1995.
|
|
