Cohabitation was the term used to describe the period between 1986 and 1988 when a socialist French president, François Mitterrand, and a centre-right coalition headed by prime minister Jacques Chirac, together formed the government of France The prospect of a president facing a strong and hostile parliamentary majority was thought to be especially problematic because of the constitutional ambiguity in the role and power of the prime minister. Mitterrand was not constitutionally required to select a prime minister from the majority coalition in the National Assembly, but an appointee from his own party would have found it extremely difficult to govern. The alternative was a centre-right prime minister (a Gaullist in the case of Chirac) who might be able to guarantee to pass legislation through the assembly, but could be presented with an impasse if presidential powers were used regularly to block the implementation of that legislation. Furthermore, all previous Fifth Republic prime ministers had been very much subordinate to the presidents, liable to be freely dismissed and in practice having little influence over the selection of ministers. This first experience of divided party control over the executive in France had been much feared as likely to cause instability. In fact French politics managed perfectly well, and there have been similar periods since.
French constitutional experts had long dreaded this situation arising, and what happened was that a very uneasy truce was worked out in which the centre-right government would not try to repeal much of its socialist predecessor’s work, and would accept that Mitterrand had a supremacy in certain areas traditionally viewed as in the president’s prerogative. This was made easier than it might have been because Mitterrand had himself always been more right wing in his defence policy than most of his party, and because the economic problems of France in the mid-1980s tended to dictate policy in that area. Nevertheless, although the two elements of the government succeeded in working together without too much strain, it was a period of relative inactivity and, had the cohabitation had to continue much longer, problems would have arisen.
Once Mitterrand had been re-elected president in 1988 he called a general election, and the French electorate, still in the mood that had reelected him, returned a sufficient number of left-wing members to the assembly for him to form a coalition government under a socialist prime minister, although this still included some ministers from the centrist Union pour la Démocratie Française. Ironically, Mitterrand had campaigned in the late 1970s to shorten the presidential term to five years to avoid the problem of cohabitation, but made no effort to carry out this promise in the first decade of his presidency. The shortening of the presidential term was finally achieved during a later period of cohabitation, which involved the conservative Chirac as president and a socialist prime minister, Lionel Jospin, in 2000. Thus Chirac’s second presidential term, to which he was elected in 2002, was scheduled to last only until 2007.
This is not a problem unique to France. It can arise in any political system where a president with real political power is elected at a different time, or separately, from the parliament. In the USA, for example, it is not at all unusual for the party of a president not to enjoy a majority in Congress. For example, following the elections of 2000, while the Republican George W. Bush won control of the presidency (albeit on a minority of votes cast), the Democrats improved their position in both the Senate and House of Representatives, ultimately gaining control of the former.
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