Emmanuel Macron chose at the last moment to engage the responsibility of his government on Thursday to pass his decried pension reform project without a vote in the National Assembly. A political thunderbolt.
“I engage the responsibility of my government on the whole bill”, asserted Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne, raising her voice to pass over the boos and the lazzi of the deputies of the opposition.
A few minutes before the start of a decisive parliamentary session during which the deputies were to vote on this crucial project for Emmanuel Macron, who plays a lot of political credit, the government convened a council of ministers.
This council authorized the government to have recourse to article 49.3 of the Constitution, which makes it possible to pass a bill without submitting it to a vote, by engaging the responsibility of the government.
Until now, Emmanuel Macron had made it known that he did not want to resort to it and that he preferred to have the deputies vote, while his coalition did not have an absolute majority in the National Assembly and had to rely on the votes of the deputies of the traditional right-wing party, Les Républicains.
Charivari at the Assembly
But after countless negotiations, feverish calculations and multiple crisis meetings, the executive clearly considered that going to the vote was too risky on this project, which moves back from 62 to 64 years from the age of departure to the retirement.
“Uncertainty hovers except for a few votes”, declared Ms. Borne at the podium, above the charivari, denouncing the “excesses and attacks”, the “excesses of some and reversals of others” in the face of the reform project, resulting, according to her, from a “compromise”.
All the tenors of the opposition castigated this decision. “Parliament will have been flouted and humiliated until the end” denounced the leader of the Communist deputies Fabien Roussel.
“It is an acknowledgment of total failure of this government (…) and for Emmanuel Macron”, declared the leader of the far right Marine Le Pen.
Mr. Macron is playing his political credit on this project, a symbol of his declared desire to reform France during his second term.
At the call of student associations, a procession of more than 1,500 young people headed for the National Assembly on Thursday, shouting “Hey Manu, Manu, 49.3 or not, we don’t want your reform”.
Motion of censure
The government led by Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne is now exposed to motions of censure and all executive power could be weakened.
The deputies of the presidential coalition have a relative majority, and the deputies from the extreme left to the extreme right would have to agree to put the government in a minority.
The tension had continued to rise over the morning, despite the favorable and unsurprising vote of the Senate, the upper house of Parliament.
“Ending this whole process with a 49.3 will be a real democratic vice and it will cause real discomfort,” said the secretary general of the reformist union CFDT Laurent Berger at a meeting of the inter-union at midday.
Social mobilization
Since January 19, hundreds of thousands of French people have demonstrated eight times to express their refusal of this reform, against the backdrop of renewable strikes, for example like that of the Parisian garbage collectors.
The sidewalks of the French capital, one of the most touristic cities in the world, are thus in places covered with mountains of smelly garbage cans.
Opponents of this reform consider it “unfair”, especially for women and employees in difficult jobs. The various opinion polls show that the French are mostly hostile to it.
The French government has chosen to raise the legal retirement age in response to the financial deterioration of pension funds and the aging of the population.
France is one of the European countries where the legal retirement age is the lowest, without the pension systems being completely comparable.
The French government has remained inflexible in the face of the strikes and days of mobilization carried out since January 19, and has followed a strategy to have the text adopted quickly, using constitutional provisions rarely implemented to speed up the debate in Parliament, where the opposition sometimes applied a strategy of obstruction.
More than 1.5 million people marched in France on Wednesday, according to the unions, 480,000 according to the Ministry of the Interior, figures down significantly.
On Wednesday, the renewable strikes – some accusing of sharp declines in the rate of strikers – to denounce this pension reform continued in several key sectors (transport, electricity and gas, roadblocks, etc.).
This article has been published automatically. Sources: ats / afp