The Specificity of the Government’s Double Political Responsibility in Semi-Presidential Regimes of France and Francophone African States

The paper discusses in a comparative manner the government’s double responsibility (to the head of state and to the parliament) in the French semi-presidential system as well as in those African countries that have adopted the Fifth Republic’s constitutional patterns. In the French case, the double responsibility has only been partially constitutionalised (the lack of political responsibility before the president of the Republic as a directly expressed constitutional formula), which proves the asymmetry of the semi-presidential regime. When it comes to the government’s political responsibility in francophone African countries, attention should be paid to the fact that semi-presidential systems in this part of the world have gone in two directions. In some of them, the relevant French constitutional arrangements have been adopted without major changes. In turn, in other analysed countries with a semi-presidential system, the principle of the government’s double responsibility has been explicitly included in their basic laws. However, regardless of differences concerning constitutional regulations, the principle of ministers’ simultaneous responsibility to the president and to the legislature seems to be strongly rooted in political practice. Hence, particular emphasis should be placed on non-constitutional factors that lead to this effect, and also on the fact that such non-constitutionalised political responsibility to the head of state is in practice much more important than such responsibility to the parliament as one of the underlying principles of every semi-presidential regime. This is due to the fact that the government’s responsibility in the group of countries under discussion is directly related to the phenomenon of consolidation of the pro-presidential constitutional paradigm. It can be argued that this is a manifestation of the progressing presidentialisation of contemporary semi-presidential systems, in which the components taken directly from a parliamentary model are visibly marginalised. This phenomenon can be reasonably perceived as one of the aspects of the characteristic dynamics of semi-presidential systems of government.