Again, the Constitution en Afrique blog has made available a really useful and otherwise difficult to find document. Following the publication of the synthesis of the Diawara report on the consolidation of democracy in Mali (see previous post), the President’s office has issued the full text of the report (all 255 pages). It is available in French here.

In addition to the items outlined in the previous post, from the perspective of this blog perhaps the most interesting item in the report is the deliberate use of the term ‘semi-presidential’ to describe the institutional arrangements in Mali.

On p. 8 the report explicitly calls for the maintenance of the country’s “semi-presidential regime”, and contrasts this type of regime with a presidential regime, on the one hand, and a parliamentary regime, on the other. Given the concept of semi-presidentialism is scarcely used by French and Francophone jurists and given that some countries with constitutions that this blog recognises as semi-presidential often denominate themselves differently (e.g. Bulgaria’s constitution calls itself parliamentary), the use of the term in French in an official report on Mali’s constitutional structure is at least noteworthy and perhaps suggests that the concept of semi-presidentialism is becoming more widely used and understood.