This is a good technical post, but I feel impelled to expand on certain aspects. I am very attached to the French Republic, but not particularly to the current Constitution : version 5 and a half, by my reckoning; I am disappointed that constitutional reform has not been an election issue (EELV, and johnny-come-lately Arnaud Montebourg, are for a Sixth Republic).

European Tribune - French Parliamentary Elections: a look under the hood

since 2002, the parliamentary elections are taking place about a month after the presidential elections, especially now that the length of the presidential term has been changed from seven years to five years, exactly the same as the term for the National Assembly MPs.

So how did this happen? There were several periods of cohabitation, as Bernard notes. This caused no major dysfunction or difficulty in the institutions of the Republic; the Constitution defines pretty clearly the domains which are reserved for the President (foreign policy and defense, principally) and there was little conflict. The only downside, from my point of view, was that the left and right were obliged into working in concensus on these questions: but since 1981, the left haven't been much good on these issues anyway.

On the whole, during cohabitation, France functioned as a parliamentary regime, and this suited me far better than the presidential regime we had before or since. When a referendum was held in 2000 on aligning the Presidential and parliamentary terms at 5 years, I would have voted against it (but didn't yet have my papers).

My wish with respect to electoral reform was for a regime that was not only parliamentary, but democratic : i.e. proportional representation. The election platform of the combined left (Gauche Plurielle : PS, PC, Verts, MRG) in 1997 included the introduction of PR. Somehow, the government of Lionel Jospin forgot to implement this (even though the PS, on its own, did not have a majority in the Assembly : the small parties missed an historic opportunity there). On the contrary, Jospin became infected with Great Man Syndrome, and cut a deal with President Chirac. Between them, they staged a soft coup d'état.

It must be emphasised that the referendum text did not specify the order of the presidential and parliamentary elections. The question was solely on aligning them on five-year terms. The logical and democratic order would be to hold parliamentary elections in order to determine the will of the people, then presidential elections to confirm, or even to counter-balance, the result. But Chirac and Jospin, once the constitutional amendment was in place, simply fixed the order of elections afterwards in the order that suited their intent : not only re-presidentialising the regime by reducing the influence of Parliament, but bipolarizing it, by ensuring that parliamentary elections will be reduced to an affrontment between the parliamentary blocs of the winning and losing candidates... thus steamrolling the small parties, even more than the two-round system naturally does.

...OK, got that off my chest.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}