Legislative Activity in Response to Crises: The Case of Opposition Parties in the French Fifth Republic’s National Assembly

The paper deals with the legislative activity of the French parliamentary opposition as a response to emerging crises of various specificity, intensity and duration. For this purpose, three separate crisis situations have been selected: the terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015, the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, and the Russian attack on Ukraine in 2022. These three crises occurred during the presidencies of two heads of state: François Hollande (the 2015 crisis) and Emmanuel Macron (the 2020 and 2022 crises). Furthermore, the extent to which France was affected varied. In the first two cases, the impact was direct, while the war in Ukraine affected France only indirectly. The main aim of the paper is to identify the intensity of the opposition's reaction in the first chamber - the National Assembly - through legislative activity in the form of submitting its own legislative initiatives. Another important question is the direction of the changes proposed by the opposition parties: whether they serve to strengthen the ruling camp's response, or whether they try to undermine its policies. A third option is that they potentially address peripheral issues, serving to supplement the government’s reaction. When analyzing these three crises, it is important to consider a fundamental change within the French party system that took place in the aftermath of Macron’s presidential victory. The latter directly impacted the composition of the parliamentary opposition. Prior to 2017, the main opposition force was the neo-Gaullist Republicans; since 2017, the Republicans have been marginalized, and the most important opposition parties have been the far left (La France insoumise) and the right (Rassemblement national). The emergence of a new party system constitutes an additional factor in analyzing the activity of the French parliamentary opposition. All this creates a new dynamic within the legislative activity of political parties outside the so-called presidential majority, that is pollical parties supporting the executive branch at the parliamentary level.