The French election showed how electoral systems shape politics. In the UK, abandoning first past the post could be transformative
You have got to hand it to Charles de Gaulle. The electoral system he created for France’s Fifth Republic has stood the test of time. More than six decades on, this week’s re-election of De Gaulle’s latest successor, Emmanuel Macron, is a reminder that the particularities of electoral systems can set the terms of a nation’s politics more lastingly than we sometimes allow. There’s a message for Britain there too, but we will come on to that.
De Gaulle’s constitution, constructed between 1958 and 1962, aimed at two goals in particular. The first was to empower De Gaulle and his successors to govern as executive presidents, embodying what the general’s biographer Julian Jackson called “a certain idea of France”. The second aim was to keep the French left, and the Communist party in particular, out of power for as long as possible.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
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