This is a last-ditch attempt. After the failure of censorship by 9 votes, the request for a referendum of shared initiative, initiated by the left to challenge the pension reform, was submitted Monday to the Constitutional Council, indicated the institution which will first examine its admissibility. Some 250 parliamentarians, deputies and senators, mainly from the left, have tabled it, while the reform has just been adopted in Parliament.
The Council must check its admissibility, in particular by looking at whether the consultation concerns the areas of “the organization of public authorities, reforms relating to economic, social or environmental policy and the public services which contribute to it”.
Then could open the collection of citizen signatures, in an attempt to reach a tenth of voters, or 4.87 million signatures, within nine months, to open the way to a referendum.
An initiative that never came to fruition
In their text, the left-wing parliamentarians judge that the “choice of extending working hours accentuates social inequalities and is particularly harmful to the most vulnerable populations”. They propose to submit to a referendum the fact that retirement “cannot be fixed beyond sixty-two years”.
A complex procedure, the shared initiative referendum (RIP) has never succeeded since its introduction into the Constitution in 2008, on the initiative of Nicolas Sarkozy.
A request for RIP had been launched in 2019-2020 to challenge the privatization of Aéroports de Paris, but stopping at just over a million signatures, below the necessary threshold. However, the government had suspended its privatization project due to the coronavirus crisis which had hit the air transport sector hard.