The world’s most, and least, democratic countries in 2022

=> The French Fifth Republic is a presidential regime, not a parliamentary regime. The consequence is that it is the government that submits legislative proposals to parliament, which can accept or reject the law. However, parliament can modify proposals or even introduce new laws.

=> In a parliamentary system, only the parliament makes the laws and the government must implement them and the implementation is checked by the parliament. It was the regime that preceded the one instituted by De Gaulle's coup in 1958.

In France, there are several provisions in the constitution to allow the government to bypass parliament.

- Article 49.3 authorizes the government to submit a law to parliament and implement it without any vote.

- Article 47.1 authorizes the government to implement a law without even presenting it to parliament.

- Various emergency cases allow the government to implement any law it wants for a limited amount of time, without presenting it to parliament, on condition that the parliament has authorized it to do so. Normally it's for a limited amount of time, but we seen for Covid that exiting the emergency case is sometimes not as natural as it should be.

- The government always has the last word, it can choose not to apply a law that it does not like. ("no implementing decree"). Thus a third of the laws promulgated each year are not implemented.

Presidential regimes are generally those chosen by dictatorships. Yet and although the fifth republic was the result of a military coup by De Gaulle in 1958, over the past two decades I have the impression that the situation of freedoms is increasingly threatened in France.