The political debate on pension reform is taking a legal turn. The leader of the French deputies rebellious in the National Assembly, Mathilde Panot, explains that she wants to appeal to the Council of State, the highest French administrative body.
On Wednesday, 77 deputies, including 68 LFI, were the subject of a call to order. This decision taken by the Bureau of the Assembly is the weakest possible disciplinary sanction. These include elected officials who held up a sign “64 years old is no”, on March 16, when the Prime Minister, Élisabeth Borne, used 49.3 to pass the text on pension reform.
Also concerned are elected officials who communicated on debates behind closed doors or others, such as Aurélien Pradié (LR), who carried a microphone for a report during sessions in the hemicycle.
Even if the sanction is weak in the hierarchy of those possible, it arouses strong reactions on the left. “We are not kids to be punished, but deputies who oppose your pension reform. No call to order will silence or scare us,” said ecologist Sandrine Rousseau.
“A performer of the base works of the executive”
Mathilde Panot announced that she would contest the calls to order before the Council of State. “If necessary” his group “will turn to the European Court of Human Rights”. A university professor of law, however, recalls a decision taken by this same Council of State in 2011. “It is not for the administrative judge to hear disputes relating to sanctions imposed by the organs of a parliamentary assembly on its members,” he wrote at the time, rejecting the request submitted to him.
“These sanctions taken against opposition MPs demonstrate that, far from enforcing the prerogatives of the legislative power, you are no more than an executor of the base works of the executive in its authoritarian turn,” said also struck Mathilde Panot at the President of the Assembly, Yaël Braun-Pivet, in a letter.
The latter herself wrote to the deputies to “remember that the Assembly is not a circus”. In her letter, she denounced “serious individual or collective dysfunctions” and “unacceptable and inappropriate behavior” since the start of the legislature last year. She criticizes a “spectacle”, described as “often lamentable in the eyes of visitors and observers of political life”.