France’s presidents famously have a lot of power — arguably more than any of their counterparts in other democratic presidential systems. This power, however, gets weakened in the — rare — situation known as “cohabitation,” where the president’s party does not have a majority in parliament, and the prime minister and president are thus from different parties. So far, the practice in these moments of cohabitation (there have been three since the beginning of the fifth republic in 1958) has been that the government takes care of domestic matters while the president gets the say over foreign and defense policy.
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