Politicki pluralizam i ustavnopravni status politickih stranaka
In: Politicka misao, Band 38, Heft 4, S. 21-32
Constitutional-formative status of political parties & political pluralism has a major impact on shaping political will in democracies. Croatia, as a country caught in the process of a (democratic & liberal) transition to democracy, must carefully contemplate how to constitutionally institutionalize, ie, legally secure recognition for political parties as the key actors in shaping peoples' political will, but at the same time by laws to legally & precisely restrain the scope & methods of their activity. In line with this, the author analyzes & evaluates the experience of the Italian First Republic & the French Fifth Republic. The constitutional standardization of political parties in those regimes took place in, for us, comparable social & political circumstances of the so-called extreme & polarized pluralism, which, according to Sartori, inevitably leads to a deeply seated crisis or even a civil war. While the Italian Constitution of 1947 recognizes that centrifugal type of political pluralism, the French Constitution of the Fifth Republic of 1958 envisages the function of its political parties in the same manner to overcome the polarized pluralism of the Fourth Republic. The Italian Constitution defines political parties as instruments above the state, providing guidance ("they determine the national politics"), while the French Constitution reduces their function to the electoral process & stipulates that they have to respect national sovereignty; ie, they have to be a "democratic" influence in the state, ancillary political participants in the democratic political process. The constitutional changes that established the Croatian Third Republic meant that the French institutional arrangement (semipresidential plurality system) was renounced as a way of overcoming polarizing party dynamics. If the French Fifth Republic was a response to the impasse of the Fourth Republic's "regime of parties," why was Croatia's Second Republic (1990-2000) forsworn & the Third republic instituted, modeled after the unequivocally failed regime of the French Fourth Republic? 61 References. Adapted from the source document.