Why every Olympic Games is opened by one scripted sentence from a head of state
Rule 55.3 of the Olympic Charter says the host nation's head of state opens the summer or winter Games by speaking a single set phrase. It is a neat illustration of the job at its most symbolic: the highest official of a sovereign country, standing in for the nation itself, sometimes with little real power.
A head of state may be a monarch or a president, and the office ranges from purely ceremonial to genuinely commanding. In parliamentary countries such as India or Britain, a separate head of government does most of the ruling. In presidential systems like the one popularised by the United States Constitution, the two roles merge in one person, whose senior appointments in the American case need a simple majority in the Senate. Semi-presidential hybrids, first seen in Finland and Germany in 1919, spread widely among new democracies in the 1990s.
Monarchies show how far the powers can vary. Japan's postwar constitution, written under Allied occupation, calls the emperor a symbol of the state and the people's unity; he formally appoints the prime minister but must choose whoever the Diet designates. Sweden's 1974 Instrument of Government went further, handing the choice of prime minister to the speaker of the Riksdag and making the government, not the king, the party to treaties. Liechtenstein moved the other way: a 2003 constitutional change gave its Reigning Prince a veto over laws and the power to dismiss the cabinet.
Symbolism is often the core of the role. Charles de Gaulle, drafting France's 1958 constitution, wanted the head of state to embody the spirit of the nation, and in hereditary monarchies the sovereign also stands for the unbroken continuity of the state. Canada's government describes its monarch as the personification of the Canadian state, although the Governor General has been allowed to exercise the monarch's prerogative powers since 1947.
Diplomacy follows the same logic. Under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, ambassadors are accredited from one head of state to another through formal letters of credence, while lower-ranking envoys report to foreign ministers. Military command need not sit with the head of state, either. Germany's Basic Law gives it to the defence minister in peacetime and to the chancellor only in a declared State of Defence, which has never happened.
Source: Head of state
