Killing them softly with their songs. Presidents and party politics in France and Romania

The paper aims to investigate the relationship between presidents and their parties in semi-presidential regimes by pointing to the fact that presidents in European semi-presidential systems have the latent ability to influence both the party organizational articulation and the overall configuration of the party competition. Our research suggests, differently from the existing literature (Samuels and Shugart, 2010), that more than in any other political regimes types, semi presidential presidents unintendingly contribute to a slow erosion of the presidential parties and thus to the constant reshufflings of the party systems. Until present, the literature traditionally has focused on the reversed relationship. The presidential authority in parliamentary and semi-presidential systems has been portrayed as highly dependent on the political opportunity structures, institutional strength, political fragmentation and the size of the majority (Tavits 2008; Sedelius & Ekman, 2010; Bucur, 2017). Other studies have already emphasized that the connection between the presidents and their parties remains above all instrumental in endorsing the presidential candidates (Shugart and Carey, 1992, Samuels and Shugart, 2010, Passarelli, 2015; 2019; Raunio & Sedelius 2020) and in securing the presidential ability to act (Passarelli 2019). Our study, by focusing on an in-depth empirical analysis of the relation between the semipresidential presidents and their parties, goes a step forward and opens the black box in the analysis of informal relations shaped across time and various political contexts, in order to better grasp the impact of presidents as “partisans in disguise” (Jastramskis 2020) on party politics. In doing so, the study tackles an aspect rarely addressed in the existing literature and unites insights from two major subfields of political research (semi-presidential studies and party politics). More specifically, it investigates the presidential carriers and the presidential efforts in shaping their parties. The various cluster of explanations will be tested against the backdrop on the French and the Romanian presidents during the last two decades