The search for the right balance of power

Imagine that the fathers of the US constitution, giants such as Thomas Jefferson or Alexander Hamilton, died without anybody noticing. Yet that is precisely what happened when Sergey Alekseyev, the man who largely wrote the current constitution of Russia, died recently. He was hastily buried, with no thanks from the country he served.

This national indifference is due to the perception that Alekseyev’s constitution was a flop, because it instituted a “semi-presidential” political system in which president and parliament can never work together. What happened in Russia is hardly just a matter of historic interest, for the same disastrous experience was recently repeated in Egypt, and other countries continue to be attracted to similar semi-presidential models, notwithstanding their grim track record.

There is, of course, no one-size-fits-all constitutional model: each nation ends up with its own constitutional arrangements, either due to a conscious choice or a historic accident or, more usually, a mixture of the two.

Still, the world’s executive systems are usually divided into two broad types: the parliamentary model of the kind inherited by most former British colonies, and the presidential model for which the US is the foremost proponent.

Both have well-known strengths and weaknesses. A parliamentary system rests on the assumption of a mutual dependence between lawmakers and ministers: governments remain in power through legislative support. That can create a strong administration, but only if political parties are cohesive, electoral systems deliver workable majorities and lawmakers act responsibly. Otherwise, the structure can resemble a prattling circus.

Invariably, however, under a parliamentary model, the head of state has largely ceremonial functions: he or she can either be a hereditary monarch or be elected. Cutting ribbons, receiving ambassadors or handing out medals are the main occupations of a ceremonial head of state.

Under a presidential system, however, the head of state is invariably directly elected, and has full executive powers. The relationship between president and parliament is one of mutual independence, precisely the reverse of the parliamentary model. That can deliver decisive government for fixed periods of time, but also threatens gridlock if the legislature and presidency are in the hands of rival parties.

Still, the American presidential model accounts for this eventuality: the US has no prime minister, and all ministers serve at the will of the president. So, although the US Congress can block some of the president’s initiatives, legislators cannot govern and the Supreme Court is there to arbitrate such disputes.

However, countries are increasingly opting for a mix of the two systems: a semi-presidential model in which both head of state and parliament share power. The initiator of this was France, in the 1950s, which bequeathed it to most of its former colonies. But over the past two decades, semi-presidentialism proved attractive elsewhere: in Russia, in Eastern Europe and, more recently, Egypt and Tunisia. Turkey is also planning a semi-presidential system from next year.

Many factors contribute to this trend. Some are largely benign: electorates in parliamentary democracies may be happy with existing governance structures but cannot understand why they should not be given the chance of electing their heads of state. So governments amend their constitutions to provide this option. 

In many cases, the popular election of a head of state who nevertheless continues to retain just ceremonial functions makes no difference to the system. In countries as diverse as Singapore, Finland or Ireland, the introduction of direct presidential ballots have not altered traditional constitutional balances.

But the danger is there, as the people of the Czech Republic discovered only last week, when their first directly elected president astonished the nation by appointing a new prime minister from a party with no majority in parliament. The Czech Republic, hitherto one of Europe’s more stable nations, essentially experienced a constitutional coup.

The Czechs are likely to recover. The country’s politicians are already planning to introduce a constitutional amendment returning to parliament powers to elect the head of state. However, in many other countries, the desire to opt for a semi-presidential system is based on the more fundamental belief that a purely parliamentary structure cannot deliver good governance, and that the country needs a stronger, single leader at the helm.

In theory, there is no reason why a semi-presidential system cannot work. After all, France experienced its longest and most sustained period of stability and economic growth under such a model over the past half-century.

Sadly, however, France is the exception rather than the rule. In most other countries, the sharing of power between an executive head of state and parliament has been a disaster, partly because it takes decades if not centuries for both executive and legislature to learn the art of working together, and because there are few institutional checks in place to negotiate and mitigate constitutional disputes.

What usually happens is that either a president becomes an absolute leader brushing parliament aside, as in Russia and more recently in Egypt with President Mohamed Morsi. Or parliament eventually wins the battle and cuts the president down to size, as happened in Poland and Romania, where heads of state tried to grab executive powers.

Yet one factor remains constant: “Tensions between president, prime minister and legislature are inherent in semi-presidentialism,” warns Professor Noah Feldman of Harvard University, an expert on constitutional arrangements.

And that usually ends up creating bigger failures. Irish professor Robert Elgie, the greatest authority on this constitutional phenomenon, has calculated that since the emergence of the semi-presidential trend in the late 20th century, 22 countries have tried the system but about three-quarters of them failed to create a stable political environment.

And there are even worse indicators: researchers studying the fate of developing countries between 1973 and 1989 have calculated that the share of democracies surviving 10 consecutive years was 61 per cent for parliamentary systems versus 20 per cent for presidential ones.

The number of countries experiencing a military coup during the same period was 18 per cent for parliamentary systems, against 40 per cent for presidential ones.

This is not, therefore, just an arcane academic dispute, but a political matter of the greatest importance. If the aim is to enhance development and stability in developing countries, the best way of achieving this is through the creation of inclusive, broad-based parliaments that work with the executive.

Ironically, the most powerful believer in global “democracy promotion”, the US, is also the biggest proponent of a presidential system. American diplomats have persistently failed to appreciate the importance of encouraging the growth of responsible, effective parliaments, preferring instead to concentrate on bolstering individuals who were deemed friendly or effective by Washington.

The US government cheered when in 1993, Boris Yeltsin, then Russia’s president, ordered tanks to blow up his country’s parliamentary building, largely because parliament was controlled by communists while Yeltsin was considered a friend of America. More recently, the US remained a cheerleader for President Morsi, utterly oblivious that the Egyptian leader was ignoring all the political forces in the country and running the state without a parliament.

Arguably, the biggest problem with US diplomacy is not so much its hectoring and condescending democracy promotion but, rather, its promoting the wrong constitutional arrangements. That has certainly been the case with two of America’s biggest democracy-promotion failures: Russia and Egypt.

Just before his death, Alekseyev tried to defend his work by claiming that the original text of the constitution he wrote for Russia envisaged a president with powers “no bigger than those of the British Queen”.

But when asked why this failed, he replied with an air of resignation: “These are our traditions. The first person has to decide all the main issues. This is how it has to be in Russia.”