EUROPEAN POLITICS FUNDAMENTALS — Chapter 7, Exercise 1
Why Cohabitation Happens
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QUESTION:
Explain, using France's real dual-executive structure, exactly why a
President's own party losing control of the National Assembly forces
cohabitation rather than simply letting the President continue
governing as before.

SOLUTION:

Under the 1958 constitution's real dual-executive design, the
President and the Prime Minister have genuinely different sources of
authority and different jobs. The President is the guardian of the
state and constitution (Articles 5 and 21) and appoints the Prime
Minister, but it's the PRIME MINISTER who actually decides the
government's day-to-day actions and policies — and the Prime
Minister's government must be able to survive in, and work with, the
National Assembly to actually govern domestically.

If the President's own party loses its Assembly majority, the
President cannot simply keep a Prime Minister from his or her own
party in place, because that Prime Minister's government would have
no working majority to pass legislation, budgets, or survive a
confidence vote. The President is therefore forced, in practice, to
appoint a Prime Minister who commands the actual majority — someone
from the opposing party — since only that person's government can
function within the Assembly at all.

This is why cohabitation isn't a choice the President makes out of
graciousness; it's a structural necessity created by the fact that
the Prime Minister's own power to govern domestically depends
entirely on Assembly support the President cannot substitute for.

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
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The strongest answers explain WHY the President can't simply
override the Assembly's own composition — tying the forced
appointment directly to the Prime Minister's real dependence on
Assembly confidence for domestic governance, rather than treating
cohabitation as a vague "tradition" or "custom."