"The central bank's independence, as an institutional counterbalance to the presidency, was also a deliberate erosion of the power of the presidency," said Gray Newman, the head of the Latin American economics group at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter in New York.
It would be a remarkable institutional rebuke of his presidency, with unknowable consequences for the credibility of American foreign policy, not only in Syria but around the world.
With a major demonstration of authority, Hollande could start pushing the French by calling on the full institutional powers of the presidency in the manner of François Mitterrand's historic course reversal when he turned away from Socialist economics in 1983.
The answer, Mr Chirac explained to the nation on July 14th, the anniversary of the 1789 revolution, is that if he were to meet the judges, he would imperil not himself as a citizen ("I have nothing to hide"), but the office of the presidency, the institutional balance of the republic and even French democracy itself.Self-serving tosh from a president campaigning to be re-elected next spring?
The presidency is the institutional office and both presidents and their boards need to be mindful that the positions are much larger than any individual.
At the start of the 21st century, presidential power, while nominally still enormous, was institutionally bogged down by congressional reforms and the changing relationship between the presidency and other institutional and noninstitutional actors.
While popularity functions stress the influence of the economy, the institutional nature of the American presidency prompts the hypothesis that foreign policy has a more compelling hold on presidential approval.
And especially when a president faces an intransigent Congress, as President Barack Obama does, the ability to use the White House to sound important themes may be one of the presidency's principal institutional advantages.
This is testament to the damage that was wrought by the Mubarak presidency on Egypt's institutional fabric.
The Italian presidency is a mostly institutional position, though it comes with important constitutional powers to send legislation back to Parliament, appoint governments, dissolve Parliament and call elections.
