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Emmanuel Macron
The French government will face two no-confidence votes on Monday over President Emmanuel Macron’s pension reform, the BBC reported.
Prime Minister Elizabeth Bourne used a constitutional power to push the bill through the lower house of parliament without a vote last week, sending thousands of French people back into the streets.
The requests for a vote of no confidence were submitted by centrist deputies and the far-right National Union, and the parliament must discuss them from 5 p.m. Bulgarian time.
If the no-confidence motions succeed, President Emmanuel Macron will not be at risk of losing his job, but the positions of Prime Minister Bourne and the government will be at risk, writes the BBC.
President Macron can either appoint a new government or dissolve parliament and call early elections. The pension reform law will also be repealed.
If the no-confidence motions fail, the bill to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64 will go into effect.
After years of delay, Paris proposed raising the retirement age to 64.
Macron argued that France’s aging population was making the current pension scheme unaffordable. But this is not a sentiment shared by everyone in Parliament.
The author of one of the two votes of no confidence, Charles de Courson, said that the removal of the government is “the only way to stop the social and political crisis in this country”, reports the Agence France-Presse.
Macron’s allies are a minority in the lower house of the National Assembly, but for no-confidence votes to succeed, the entire opposition must unite.
France’s Republican Party has 61 seats, and last week their leader Eric Ciotti said they would not support motions of no confidence. However, he said the decision to use the constitution to bypass parliament was “the result of many years of political failures” which demonstrated a “deep crisis in our constitution”.
Passing the pension reform is a pyrrhic victory for Macron
The decision to use the constitutional power to push through a law without a vote in the lower house has angered many in France, with protesters clashing with police over the weekend.