[Tryst with the Constitution] Why constitutional design matters: Deadlocks in France and the United States

Across the world’s democracies, the past year has been one of constitutional turbulence. In France, multiple prime ministers have been sworn in within months as President Emmanuel Macron struggles to command a legislative majority. In the United States, a government shutdown has once again paralysed federal operations due to a deadlock between Congress and the President.

Both moments reflect a deeper truth: that constitutional design, more than politics alone, shapes the resilience of democracy in moments of crisis.

As India completes seventy-five years under the Constitution, it is worth stepping back from our own debates and looking outward. Why are established democracies facing systemic deadlocks? And why has India, despite its own political volatility, largely avoided constitutional paralysis? The answer lies in the wisdom of our Constitution framers who, after surveying the world’s constitutional experiments, chose a parliamentary system that fused responsibility with flexibility.

France’s Fifth Republic represents one of the most distinctive hybrid models in modern constitutional design - a semi-presidential system, where executive power is divided between a directly elected President and a Prime Minister responsible to Parliament. In France, Parliament comprises two chambers - the National Assembly and the Senate. But it is the National Assembly, the lower house, that exercises control over the government through its power to grant or withdraw confidence. Under this arrangement, the President appoints a Prime Minister - usually from the party or coalition that commands a majority in the National Assembly - who must maintain that chamber’s confidence to remain in office. While the President oversees foreign affairs, defence and the broader direction of national policy, the Prime Minister is responsible for the day-to-day administration and the domestic implementation of laws.

This model was intended to balance stability with democratic accountability: the President would represent continuity and national unity, while the Prime Minister would ensure day-to-day responsiveness to Parliament. The rationale was to combine the legitimacy of a directly elected head of state with the flexibility of parliamentary governance.

Yet, this dual legitimacy carries its own risk. When the President and Parliament are controlled by different political blocs, executive authority becomes divided and the system enters a phase of “cohabitation”—a term used in France to describe periods when the two branches are politically opposed. Decision-making slows, policy coherence weakens and accountability diffuses.

The recent elections produced a hung National Assembly, leaving neither the President’s centrist alliance nor the left-wing bloc with a clear majority. Since then, France has cycled through Gabriel Attal, Michel Barnier (appointed in September 2024 and toppled by a no-confidence vote in early December 2024), François Bayrou (appointed in December 2024 and ousted after losing a confidence vote on September 2025) and Sébastien Lecornu (appointed in October 2025 and has since survived two no-confidence motions). The current turmoil reflects political instability rather than constitutional breakdown, but it exposes a deeper structural tension: the system creates two sources of democratic legitimacy without always providing a clear mechanism for reconciling them.

Across the Atlantic, the United States faces a different but related challenge. Its presidential system is built on a strict separation of powers: the President and Congress are separately elected and serve fixed terms. This arrangement, born from eighteenth-century distrust of concentrated authority, ensures institutional independence but also produces rigidity. Each branch of government - the executive, the legislature and the judiciary - acts as a check on the other, preventing the concentration of power but often making coordination difficult.

The recent federal government shutdown, one in a long line of similar episodes, illustrates this. When the President and the legislative majority cannot agree on budgetary allocations, federal agencies simply cease to function until a compromise is reached. Such shutdowns are not signs of constitutional failure, but of institutional immobility: a system designed to check power so thoroughly that it can, at times, prevent governance itself.

The American model’s strength lies in stability - fixed tenures, clear separation and strong checks. But its weakness lies in inflexibility. With no confidence mechanism, the only route out of a deadlock is political negotiation, not constitutional adjustment. Theoretically, the President can be removed through impeachment, but the process carries an exceptionally high threshold and is intended for misconduct, not for resolving political disagreement. The result is a recurring stalemate, where endurance replaces adaptability.

When the framers of the Indian Constitution debated the form of government, they were acutely aware of the alternatives before them. As Dr BR Ambedkar explained in his address to the Constituent Assembly while introducing the final draft, a democratic executive must satisfy two conditions - stability and responsibility. Yet, no system guarantees both in equal measure. The American presidential model, founded on a strict separation of powers, offers stability by insulating the executive from the legislature, but that very insulation makes it less responsive in daily governance and only periodically accountable through elections. The British parliamentary model, by contrast, enables continuous (daily) accountability through questions, motions, debates and the ever-present possibility of a confidence vote.

The Constitution, therefore, deliberately preferred responsibility over stability, choosing a parliamentary executive drawn from and answerable to the legislature.

At its core, this model fuses the executive and the legislature: the government remains in office only so long as it commands the confidence of the Lok Sabha. This arrangement creates a continuous chain of accountability and provides a built-in constitutional mechanism to resolve political deadlocks. The government must resign or seek a fresh mandate when it loses majority support.

The advantages of this design became evident during the coalition era of the 1990s. India witnessed frequent government changes - VP Singh, Chandra Shekhar, Narasimha Rao, Deve Gowda, Gujral, Vajpayee - each falling through constitutionally prescribed processes such as no-confidence votes and dissolutions. These were moments of political instability, but not constitutional paralysis.

Unlike the United States, where conflict cannot dislodge the executive, or France, where divided legitimacy leads to paralysis, India’s parliamentary model allows instability to be resolved within the constitutional framework.

However, the Indian model is not immune to distortion. Over time, it has allowed excessive concentration of power in the Prime Minister’s Office and weakened legislative oversight. These tendencies, however, arise not from the design itself, but from the political culture that has evolved around it. The structure fosters accountability; its erosion reflects practice, not principle.

India’s framers sought a system that prioritised accountability over rigidity - one capable of reconciling change without institutional deadlock. Their choice of the parliamentary model has endured precisely because it can absorb political shocks without constitutional collapse.

As democracies around the world confront fractured mandates, populist measures and institutional distrust, the Indian experience offers a quiet reminder of constitutional prudence. Our framers did not design a perfect system; they designed a workable one. By anchoring executive power in legislative confidence, they ensured that authority remained accountable and that instability could be resolved within constitutional bounds.

France and the United States stand today as two extremes: one with a divided executive whose authority oscillates between the President and the Prime Minister, the other immobilised by rigid separation of powers. India’s parliamentary design, for all its imperfections, offers a pragmatic middle ground - valuing responsibility, adaptability and continuity in equal measure.

Swapnil Tripathi leads Charkha, the Constitutional Law Centre at the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy.

Views are personal.