Dennis Boyles has a very worthwhile EuroPress review on the French government and why it’s so dysfunctional. The short answer is that it was built that way.
The French system of government is controlled by a group of people called the énarques after the École Nationale d’Administration, or as Boyle puts it "Technocrat U". In essence, imagine if everyone in Congress and the White House had gone to exactly the same school and gone through exactly the same program. It would be like if Harvard, Yale, and Princeton’s government programs were all merged into one and everyone in government would invariably go through that program.
What you would get would be a group of people who all thought alike because they had been all trained alike. And that’s the problem – France is plagued by a case of groupthink on a monster scale. Les énarques aren’t exactly known for thinking outside the box, and while Chiraq is considered "right-wing" by French standards, he’s hardly a conservative in any sense of the word.
When you have such a concentrated cabal of people who all think alike, good government is nearly impossible. Add to that the way in which the &eactute;narques are isolated from the will of the people, and you’re virtually guaranteed bureaucratic mission creep, arrogance, and inefficiency – all of which the French government has in spades.
Ghislaine Ottenheimer has a new book called Les Intouchables that explores the world of the énarques in great detail and explains why the French government is "hopelessly corrupt" and accountability is nearly unheard of in the French system.
This is why I believe there needs to be a Sixth Republic in France. The existing system is hopelessly flawed. There needs to be direct accountability to the people directly enshrined in the French Constitution. The École Nationale d’Administration needs to be abolished as the "leadership factory" of the French state in order to bring in new perspectives and new ideas. The incestuous relationship between the French government and the French press (which is only now beginning to break down) needs to end.
Unfortunately, when the state is not only banning religious expression, but becoming a religion unto itself, the idea of reform becomes paramount to blasphemy. However, if reform does not come about and soon, the demographic and economic pressures weighing down on the French state will become too much for it to bear, and when the system fails then it will fail catastrophically.
