Constitutionalism Put to the Test: Institutions, Democracy, and the Rule of Law

The tensions currently affecting constitutionalism, both in France and across Europe, are numerous and profound. The Fifth Republic has been undergoing a silent constitutional crisis for several years: repeated recourse to emergency procedures, minority governments, challenges to the presidential system, and the erosion of parliamentary culture.

At the same time, the judicialization of constitutional law—accelerated by the priority preliminary ruling on constitutionality since 2010—has reshaped the relationship between law and politics, and between judges and elected officials. And the rise of European law continues to challenge the constitutional sovereignty of member states, without existing doctrinal frameworks always being sufficient to account for it.

This interview addresses all of these issues: the actual state of the institutions of the Fifth Republic, the place of the Constitutional Council within the architecture of power, the challenges that European integration poses to national constitutionalism, and, more broadly, what constitutional law can still achieve in the face of democracies that doubt themselves.

A professor at the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne and former president of the French Association of Constitutional Law, she is one of the few academics to have participated from within in two major revisions of the Constitution—by contributing to the work of the Avril Commission on the criminal status of the head of state, and then to that of the Balladur Committee, whose report directly inspired the constitutional reform of July 23, 2008.