France and Germany failed at parliamentary government in opposite structural ways.

Evidence

The German system, on the other hand, made Parliament a more or less useful battlefield for conflicting interests and opinions whose main function was to influence the government but whose practical necessity in the handling of state affairs was, to say the least, debatable. In France, the parties suffocated the government; in Germany, the state emasculated the parties. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 643

Categorization

• XREF: This dichotomy of state-above-parties (Germany) vs. party-dominated-parliament (France) parallels the class-‘hegemony via state’ vs. ‘hegemony via party’ distinction Arendt lays out elsewhere; it prefigures how nationalist movements positioned themselves ‘above parties’ — the gap modern populism claims to fill.