[jnaddef]

> > the sole real seat of power is the office of the presidency

> is plainly wrong. The president still can lose their majority in parliament, they still can have an hostile prime minister, and they still don’t control the judges. There are many examples of the 3 powers slipping away from the president at various times after De Gaulle. A minority president is also becoming more and more likely as the candidates struggle and the parties keep shooting themselves in their respective feet. Not a great start.

Since 2002 you are wrong. The reason being that the president is elected every 5 years, and the parliament is also elected every 5 years, only a few months after the presidential election. This means there is no such thing as "losing their majority in parliament". If people elected a president, 2 months later they will vote for the parliament the president wants as there is no time for the president to f*ck up in the meantime and make people change their minds.

When the presidency was 7 years then the president could indeed lose their majority in the parliament.

[OJFord]

Does France not have snap elections or delays for some reason or another - or if there are, it always affects the presidential election too?

Or, lower probability sure, what about by-elections? Say you have a majority of one, someone resigns/dies/does something awful, vote goes the other way in the by-election?

[jnaddef]

> Say you have a majority of one

This rarely happens if the parliament is elected right after the president is. Electing members of the parliament becomes: "do I want the president to be able to rule the country, or do I want nothing to happen in the next 5 years?".

The clearest example of that was in 2017, when Macron was elected, and people voted in over 300 people that had never been elected before, often were completely unknown to the public, the only thing they did was declaring : "I will vote for whatever the president asks me to vote for" (not an actual quote, but in order to get support from Macron they had to sign a paper saying they would vote "yes" for every proposition emanating from their group, and "no" to every proposition from the opposition)

[kergonath]

See my other reply upthread. I agree that this change was designed to ensure a majority for the president. But the political landscape has changed lot since then, in ways that were difficult to foresee. It is not unimaginable to end up with an unpopular president elected by default, even as their party gets ~30% of the seats at the parliament. Then, the opposition has strong incentive to hammer out a coalition government.

The 5th republic is founded on the premise of strong parties. In 2002, the landscape has been dominated by a right-wing coalition (UDR, RPR, UMP and their satellites) and a left-wing one (SFIO, then PS) for half a century. The candidate of both mainstream blocks polling below 15% was very hard to imagine.

Coupling both presidential and legislative elections might not be enough to avoid further splintering in the future.