the government has the first measures of its project adopted in the Senate

The Minister of Labor, Olivier Dussopt, during the government’s presentation of the pension reform project, in the Senate, on March 2, 2023. CYRIL BITTON FOR “THE WORLD”

Caught between a right which wants to impose its markers and a left monopolizing the floor to display its opposition, the executive nevertheless managed to have the first provisions of its pension reform adopted by the Senate.

At the end of a fourth day of discussion, the senators voted by 244 votes against 96, on the night of Sunday March 5 to Monday March 6, article 2 on the “senior index” for companies. The senatorial majority of the right and the center adopted an amendment so that this tool concerns companies with more than 300 employees, against 50 in the National Assembly which had rejected this article 2. If it aims to force these structures to publish indicators on their employment of seniors each year, the left has defended the removal of a « gadget inutile » to curb senior unemployment.

Alone on the bench to defend the text which aims to raise the legal retirement age from 62 to 64, the Minister of Labor, Olivier Dussopt, was also able to count on Les Républicains (LR) and the Centrist Union for the adoption, on Saturday March 4, of article 1^iswith 233 votes against 99. It puts an end to certain special schemes (RATP, electricity and gas industries, Banque de France, etc.) for new hires, “from 1^is September 2023 ».

Read also: Pension reform: what is the “senior index” that the government wants to put in place?

But throughout the weekend, the discussions were mostly dominated by the tunnels of amendments tabled by left-wing senators. Elected socialists, ecologists and communists have regularly scolded the Minister of Labor for his lack of “sincerity” about a reform “untidy”. On Sunday, the senators even went so far as to question him on a “hidden agenda” of the executive, according to the expression of the communist Fabien Gay. At issue: an article introduced in the Assembly, after an amendment by Renaissance MP Marc Ferracci, providing that the government submit a report within a year on “the possibility, conditions and timetable for the implementation of a universal pension system”.

“Enough, now! »

If for Laurence Rossignol, socialist senator from Oise, this amendment “does not bode well”it is mainly symptomatic “turnarounds, ambiguities, changes of foot, about-turns” of the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, after the abandonment of his project for a universal system in 2020. With the support of the LRs and the centrists, also hostile, the article was rejected almost unanimously (by 292 vote against 1).

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