France
Résumé
For the French constitutional scholar studying constitutional reforms, the years pass and seem to resemble one another, as if each year we woke up with I got you babe on Groundhog Day. 2021 saw some failed reforms, as we explained last year, and the same can be said for 2022: no formal constitutional reform took place.
It is no surprise, as we had predicted last year that the year 2022 would be cannibalized by the presidential and legislative elections that happened, respectively in late April and mid-June. While Emmanuel Macron was comfortably reelected, he still lost his absolute majority in the National Assembly… Becoming the weakest President in terms of majority granted right after his election (his contender being President François Mitterrand after the 1988 election). While the long-term effects of this relative majority are still to be pinpointed, it could very well have impacts on future constitutional amendment proceedings.
It does not mean that nothing of interest happened from a constitutional point of view: a bill was introduced, discussed and adopted in 2022 and is still underway as of writing, and the complicated political situation put in place after the elections have brought unforeseen developments akin to either an informal constitutional reform or a change of two constitutional conventions.