His relatives have been repeating it for years, like a mantra: Emmanuel Macron is a player, he loves “take your risk”. This week, the President of the Republic will be served. His pension reform, rejected by the street, begins its final descent to Parliament. Fourteen deputies and senators are to meet on Wednesday March 15 during a joint joint committee (CMP) to try to find a version of the text acceptable to both chambers. If this CMP is conclusive, the Senate and then the National Assembly will vote, Thursday, March 16, on this version.
Except that the landing strip at the National Assembly is immersed in thick fog. The executive is still unsure whether it has enough votes to pass the bill, due to a few recalcitrant majority MPs and a divided right. This leaves the shadow of recourse to Article 49.3 of the Constitution, allowing a text to be adopted without a vote. A very risky option democratically. If the mobilization weakened, Saturday March 11, the opponents do not disarm, with an eighth day of mobilization scheduled for Wednesday March 15. “We sail on sight and we try to cross step by step”summarizes the entourage of the Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne.
Sunday, M.me Borne invited the ministers concerned by the text to Matignon to implement the strategy and show his determination. At the end of this meeting, the government spokesman, Olivier Véran, presented the objective: as far as possible, not to force through. ” We don’t want 49.3. We want to transform our relative majority into an absolute majority”, he said. On France 2, Gabriel Attal, minister delegate in charge of public accounts, repeated that adopting the text without a vote was not the preferred track, without definitively excluding it, since article 49.3 appears “by definition in the Constitution”. There are four days left in M.me Bollard to hunt the votes of elected officials. In order to mobilize its troops, it will bring together a dozen majority deputies on Monday, March 13.
“The democratic debate has taken place”
The Matignon sky cleared up a little bit overnight from Saturday to Sunday. With 195 votes for and 112 against, the senators adopted the reform. A result obtained with forceps after the use of Article 44.3 of the Constitution. The use of this “single vote” procedure accelerated the debates but angered the left-wing opposition, whose amendments were suddenly swept away. The executive assumes. The Elysée and Matignon feared that « l’obstruction » of the opposition prevents them from obtaining a parliamentary vote on a text whose examination had not been completed in the National Assembly. “The democratic debate has taken place”says Matignon, careful to take care of the legitimacy of a highly contested reform.
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