First-past-the-post voting manufactures ungoverability

Four prime ministers in fifteen months [9]. Trust in the National Assembly fallen to 20 % [1]. France holds the European record for democratic distrust, under a first-past-the-post system that no longer produces the stable majorities it was supposed to guarantee. The choice facing us in 2027 is architectural: change the voting system, the election calendar, and coalition rules all at once, or maintain the status quo with its now-quantified consequences.

France, alone in Europe with this voting system, and the most distrustful of its institutions

France is the only country in the European Union to elect its deputies under first-past-the-post voting. For sixty years, this singularity had a functional justification: producing stable majorities. It no longer does.

In 2026, 22 % of French people trust the presidential institution, 20 % trust the National Assembly, 26 % trust the Senate, 34 % trust their own deputy [1]. In 2025, only 26 % of French people declared confidence in politics, compared with 47 % in Germany and 39 % in Italy [2].

In 2026, 51 % of French people believe there is nothing to be proud of in the democratic system [1]. In Italy, that figure falls to 40 %, in Germany to 34 %, in the United Kingdom to 32 % [1]. It is not the democratic principle itself that is rejected: attachment to the regime remains strong, at 82 % of respondents. “It is the ineffectiveness of democracy that is at stake,” the CEVIPOF concludes [1].

In 2026, 65 % of French people believe that Parliament’s power should be strengthened relative to the government’s [1]. Nearly eight French people out of ten say they favor more frequent recourse to referendums to decide important laws. The demand for participation is a stable underlying trend across several waves of the barometer [1].

The only political institutions that are holding up are local: 60 % of respondents trust their mayor, 58 % trust their municipal council [1]. The local-to-national gradient is one of the most stable findings in the barometer. It reveals what an institutional reform should reconstruct at the national level.

Electoral turnout confirms this long erosion. Ranging between 70 and 80 % until the 1980s, it has undergone an almost continuous decline since the 1993 election [7]. In 2022, the first round of the legislative election reached a record abstention rate of 52.5 % [7]. Over a generation, France has lost twenty to thirty percentage points of legislative participation. This is a transformation, not a fluctuation.

A parliamentary regime that refuses to see itself as such

Government instability since summer 2024 reveals a structural shift. Without a single word of the Constitution being modified, France has changed regimes. This is the thesis of Benjamin Morel in The New Regime or Impossible Parliamentarism [3].

Power once concentrated at the Élysée has returned to an Assembly long perceived as a rubber-stamp chamber. In 2024, this assembly comprises 25 % National Rally deputies and 12 % France Unbowed deputies [3]. The field of possible alliances has narrowed, forcing baroque coalitions in a configuration that recalls the dying Fourth Republic.

One fact of electoral mechanics amplifies this shift, documented by Morel in a note for France Strategy from May 2025 [4]: first-past-the-post voting does not, in itself, reduce the number of parties present in Parliament. There are now eleven political groups in the National Assembly. The promise of reducing fragmentation that this voting system was supposed to deliver is no longer being kept [4].

The dissolution of June 9, 2024 triggered a new governmental instability not seen since the Fourth Republic. Four prime ministers succeeded one another in fifteen months [9]. Four exercises in team formation. Four tests of budgetary credibility. A structural impossibility of conducting reforms over a five-year horizon.

The underlying mechanism goes beyond voting system alone. The organic law adopted after the five-year term reform in 2002 “stripped legislative elections of their substance” by having the presidential election precede the legislative one, transforming the latter into a plebiscite or anti-plebiscite on the presidency [10]. When the presidential election produces a relative majority or a three-way split, the entire system jams.

The current crisis strikes a democracy whose principles are acclaimed but whose functioning generates enormous frustration. The populism that results is a structural and recurring phenomenon, far more than a passing accident: since Boulangism in the 1880s, France has periodically relived this tension between representative democracy and popular sovereignty [6].

Three-way polarization and algorithmic delegation, two transformations outside the framework

Two phenomena are reconfiguring the context within which any institutional reform must operate, without being integrated into the dominant debate.

The first is three-way polarization. The political landscape is now structured by three forces—New Popular Front, centrist bloc, and far right—which first-past-the-post voting mechanically amplifies [3]. It forces withdrawals and second-round alliances that discredit the parties that practice them and exasperate voters subjected to them. The Fifth Republic finds itself at a crossroads: finding parliamentary equilibrium, sinking into ungoverability, or sliding into illiberalism [3].

Despite its political fragmentation, France remains one of the only countries wholly incapable of building coalitions. One point is glossed over in the debate, notes the France Strategy report from May 2025 [4]: a voting system is a tool serving to translate votes into seats. One can only judge an instrument on its efficiency. Pure proportional representation without threshold or bonus can reproduce or worsen instability.

The second phenomenon is the arrival of AI agents in state decision-making processes. Organizations need to delegate authority, but in doing so they risk losing control of the agent’s behavior [11]. This tension takes on new dimensions with AI agents capable of making administrative decisions without effective human oversight. For already-fragile democratic institutions, delegation to algorithmic systems in states whose control capacity remains weak poses a new challenge [11].

These two transformations converge toward the same issue: the quality of representation can no longer be read solely through the filter of voting system. It also depends on institutions’ capacity to produce decisions that are legible, controllable, and claimed by those who govern.

Changing the voting system, the calendar, and coalition rules simultaneously—or not at all

The causal chain established by the data leads to a conclusion different from the dominant agenda. Reforming only the voting system, even by adopting proportional representation, without simultaneously addressing the election calendar, coalition culture, and budgetary clarity of political choices, will not restore trust. The popularity of proportional representation was already, said Ferdinand Buisson in 1910, chiefly made up of unpopularity with the current regime. A century later, the dynamic is identical.

Reform the voting system with integrated governability mechanisms. Thresholds, bonuses, or incentives for coalition can favor the production of durable governments [4]. The German model, with its 5 % threshold, two-ballot voting, and implicit coalition bonus, constitutes a reference tested over several decades. The objective is governable representativeness, not pure proportionality.

Restore legislative elections’ autonomy by reversing the calendar. The 2001 organic law logically transformed legislative elections into a plebiscite or anti-plebiscite on the presidency [10]. Restoring legislative elections before the presidential one, as before 2002, would restore to Parliament its role as producer of the governing majority.

Build a coalition culture through formalized agreement rules. France does not know how to negotiate this type of alliance: it has no experience of it [12]. North European parliamentary democracies have formalized these processes over several decades—published coalition contracts, institutional mediators, exit rules. These practices can be encouraged by party financing rules conditioned on their capacity for coalition.

Rebuild legitimacy through framed direct participation. In 2026, 79 % of French people wish for more frequent recourse to referendums to decide important laws [1]. The same proportion favors citizen assemblies followed by a binding referendum [1]. Legitimacy rests on a “common identification” that transcends the mere legality of procedures, as Rosanvallon shows in The Invisible Institutions [5]. Citizen assemblies on delimited subjects, followed by a vote, reconstruct a direct link without disarming Parliament.

On the budgetary front, credits for organizing elections went from 180.2 million euros in 2024 to 23.08 million euros in 2025, in the absence of a national election [13]. The direct cost of a voting system reform is marginal compared with the indirect cost of instability: four governments in fifteen months means four losses of administrative continuity and a structural impossibility of maintaining a reform trajectory [9].

If frustration continues to grow without institutional response, democratic principles themselves will end up being contested. Governability and representativeness can coexist. Their combination requires a clear architectural choice, not another postponement.

Sources

[1] CEVIPOF/Sciences Po, “Political Trust Barometer, Wave 17,” OpinionWay, February 2026, https://www.sciencespo.fr/cevipof/fr/actualites/barometre-de-la-confiance-politique-cevipof-2026-la-confiance-s-effondre-en-politique-la-proximite-fait-figure-de-refuge/ (accessed 11/08/2026).

[2] CEVIPOF/Sciences Po, “Political Trust Barometer, Wave 16,” OpinionWay, 2025, https://www.sciencespo.fr/cevipof/fr/actualites/barometre-de-la-confiance-politique-du-cevipof-2025-le-grand-desarroi-democratique/ (accessed 11/08/2026).

[3] Benjamin Morel, The New Regime or Impossible Parliamentarism, Passés composés, February 2025, https://www.lapetitelumiere.fr/livre/9791040410782-le-nouveau-regime-ou-l-impossible-parlementarisme-benjamin-morel/ (accessed 11/08/2026).

[4] Benjamin Morel, “Proportional Voting System: Between Promises and Challenges,” Plan Collection, no. 2025-01, France Strategy, May 2025, https://www.strategie-plan.gouv.fr/publications/le-mode-de-scrutin-proportionnel-entre-promesses-et-defis-par-benjamin-morel (accessed 11/08/2026).

[5] Pierre Rosanvallon, The Invisible Institutions, Seuil, October 2024, https://shs.cairn.info/revue-futuribles-2025-2-page-138?lang=fr (accessed 11/08/2026).

[6] Marc Lazar, For the Love of the People: A History of Populism in France, 19th–21st Centuries, Gallimard, 2025, https://www.sciencespo.fr/ceri/en/cerispire-user/7339/1524 (accessed 11/08/2026).

[7] LCP / National Assembly, “2024 Legislative Elections: Toward Strong Recovery in Turnout After Long Decline?,” June 2024, https://lcp.fr/actualites/legislatives-2024-vers-un-fort-regain-de-participation-apres-une-longue-tendance-a-la (accessed 11/08/2026).

[8] Marcel Gauchet, The Democratic Knot: At the Origins of the Neoliberal Crisis, Gallimard, October 2024, https://www.gallimard.fr/catalogue/le-noeud-democratique/9782073085313 (accessed 11/08/2026).

[9] Public Sénat, “Ministerial Shuffle, Holding Patterns: The Staggering Numbers of a Record Political Year,” October 2025, https://www.publicsenat.fr/actualites/institutions/valse-des-ministres-affaires-courantes-les-chiffres-fous-dune-annee-politique-record (accessed 11/08/2026).

[10] David Djaïz, Slow Democracy, Allary Éditions, 2019; interview, Public Sénat, January 2021, https://www.publicsenat.fr/actualites/politique/nous-vivons-sous-un-regime-qui-arrive-a-bout-de-souffle-previent-david-djaiz-187017 (accessed 11/08/2026).

[11] Francis Fukuyama, “Delegation and Destruction,” Persuasion, 2025, https://www.persuasion.community/p/delegation-and-destruction (accessed 11/08/2026).

[12] Le Grand Continent, “Toward Proportional Representation: For a French Culture of Coalition,” June 2025, https://legrandcontinent.eu/fr/2025/06/06/vers-la-proportionnelle-pour-une-culture-francaise-de-la-coalition/ (accessed 11/08/2026).

[13] Senate, Draft Budget Law for 2025: General and Territorial State Administration, Special Rapporteur’s Report, https://www.senat.fr/rap/l24-144-32/l24-144-323.html (accessed 11/08/2026).