A president is a head of state in a republic, who can represent, legally and symbolically, the entire state. Usually the presidency carries only the symbolic and emotional powers of a modern constitutional monarchy, with the added limitation that they must in some sense be elected and do not achieve their position by family inheritance. Some, and the US president is the leading example, are also powerful political figures as heads of the executive. Still more complex is a situation like that in the French Fifth Republic where the president has somewhat usurped direct head of government powers from the prime minister, while the constitutional position might be argued to restrict the president to the role of head of state.
Like monarchial heads of state, the ultimate power that nearly all presidents still have is to be influential, and possibly determining, in the selection of who should be the head of government after any election where the results are unclear.
They usually have, in addition, emergency powers, though these are very seldom used. Presidents are by no means confined to electoral democracies; the need to identify an individual as at least the symbolic leader of the people has meant that most dictatorships and one-party systems also have a presidential role. Modern democracies have to choose directly between having a parliamentary or a powerful presidential constitution. There is clearly no one correct solution. At the same time that the newly democratized Eastern European countries all chose not to have powerful presidencies because they thought parliaments better at building consensus, Italy considered adopting one because the divided nature of its society makes parliamentary government so unstable (see Italian Second Republic).
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