"To break the French impasse, why not call on the European Mario Draghi?"

The fall of François Bayrou's government, less than a year after that of the Barnier government, is enough to shock people. Should we blame the institutions of the ^Fifth Republic, which have become incapable of sustaining French representative democracy? Should we consider that our parliamentary life is definitively fragmented due to the tensions inherent in French society? Without going that far and perhaps too hasty in our diagnosis, we can suggest turning our gaze to our European neighbors. This is where we can find inspiration that is both more pragmatic and less dramatic. Europe has two examples to offer us.

First, there is European know-how based on building a coalition of goodwill between political forces. In some cases, this coalition must agree on the essentials and adopt part of the program of each of its members. This scenario is deeply rooted in European political culture. It characterizes the Benelux countries, Germany, Austria, and even Denmark and Estonia.

Even if the model of large parties uniting European political life around them is experiencing a certain erosion, the tradition still has some fine remains, as we see in Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Sweden, and even Poland.

In France, this coalition path has not yet emerged. No political "camp" has a majority, and the parties do not want to hear about a full-fledged coalition. Even a government without a majority, which would launch blindly into the budget debate in the hope of gradually gathering consensus votes, is absolutely not certain of success. As for new legislative elections, the same social and ideological fragmentation would produce the same effects. These early legislative elections would result in a political configuration that has barely changed, which would still have no practicable path to propose to the Assemblies.

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