Macron, Russia and the election fantasy that the constitution refuses to entertain

The internet has once again found a grand plot where the law offers only paperwork. According to a stream of social media posts, Emmanuel Macron is not warning about security risks for their own sake but is instead trying to drag France into a war with Russia, then use the crisis to keep himself in office. It is a neat story, which is usually a warning sign rather than a revelation.

Macron cannot, however, stay on past the 2027 presidential election by sheer force of mood music. French presidents are limited to two consecutive terms, and constitutional experts say the rest of the theory falls apart as soon as one opens the text. The claim that a war could be manufactured to justify postponing the vote, they argue, is not how the French constitution works, no matter how many shares it collects.

The first obstacle is the president’s war powers. Under Article 35, the head of state is not free to launch an armed conflict alone. Guillaume Tusseau, a constitutional law professor at Sciences Po Law School, said the president is commander-in-chief, but must share authority with the government because the army is placed at the government’s disposal, not at the personal disposal of the president. Parliament must authorise any armed intervention, and the government has to present it there. A presidential shortcut, in other words, would be a constitutional violation, with impeachment proceedings as the obvious consequence.

Even a direct war involving France would not automatically change the election timetable. Article 7 sets the presidential election between 20 and 35 days before the current term ends. Tusseau said postponement is only possible in narrow cases, such as if a candidate dies or becomes incapacitated shortly before the first round, or between the two rounds. If France were directly under attack, a delay could be justified for voter safety. But nothing in the constitution allows the president to move the election simply because a political calendar has become inconvenient.

That leaves Article 16, the emergency clause that gives the president exceptional powers when the institutions, independence, territorial integrity or international commitments of the country face a serious and immediate threat. Even there, the room for improvisation is limited. The president must consult the prime minister, the presidents of the assemblies and the Constitutional Council. Baptiste Charvin, a constitutional lawyer who wrote his comparative law thesis on combating disinformation, said people have alluded to Article 16 before, including around Macron’s 2020 lockdown announcement and again in 2022 following the outbreak of war in Ukraine.

Charvin said the clause requires a very high threshold of public calamity, a safeguard added precisely to curb abuse. He pointed to Charles de Gaulle’s use of Article 16 in 1961 during the Algiers putsch, when renegade French generals in Algeria staged a coup attempt. Tusseau added that Article 16 is designed to allow legislative and administrative measures, not constitutional ones. The idea that a president could use it to amend the constitution, and thereby extend his own stay in office, is highly dubious for most constitutional scholars.

So the claim collapses on contact with the legal text. There is no evidence that Macron is plotting a war to postpone 2027, and the constitution offers him no clean route to do so anyway. That does not make institutions invulnerable, merely less pliable than online speculation likes to imagine. Charvin warned that constitutional devices can still be abused despite careful drafting, and Tusseau pointed to Poland and Hungary as reminders that rules are only as strong as the political culture around them. France may have its share of theatrical politics, but the constitution is not quite the prop people on social media seem to think it is.

Written by Thorben Thiede thorben.thiede@alpineweekly.com