2023-10-10 13:30:03
There was something unreal in the priority given, by the President of the Constitutional Council first, and then by the President of the Republic, in their respective speeches for the 65th anniversary of the Constitution, to a constitutional revision which would facilitate the use of the shared initiative referendum (RIP). No one has forgotten that the nine wise men of the Palais-Royal rejected four of the five RIP attempts since 2015 – including the last two to maintain retirement at 62 -, by decisions which are far from unanimous among jurists, and this to the greatest satisfaction of the tenant of the Elysée, who thanked in passing the Council for its independence.
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Concerning the Head of State, the only one capable of launching a revision process, the impression of dreaming quickly dissipated after the announcement of his desire to broaden the scope of the referendum and ” goodbye “ the thresholds for the number of signatures for the RIP. Emmanuel Macron hastened to add that it would nevertheless be necessary “establish solid guarantees to avoid competition between legitimacy”. At a minimum, this means that neither the questioning of the ban on the RIP to repeal a law promulgated less than a year ago, nor, as the President of the Constitutional Council wished, are on the agenda. , Laurent Fabius, the questioning of the power of the Chambers, once the signatures have been collected, to prevent the holding of the referendum by the sole fact of« examiner » the referendum proposal.
In this case, it is even likely that the President of the Republic intends to subsequently restrict the triggering of the RIP, in accordance with the draft constitutional revision (remained in the drawers) of 2019. This provided for the extension to three years of the deadline after promulgation of a law, as well as the ban on the referendum “on the same subject as a provision introduced during the legislature and currently under examination in Parliament or definitively adopted by the latter and not yet promulgated”. A real shield, which would have allowed and would allow, if the president reintroduced these conditions, to rule out practically anything.
Supremacy of popular legitimacy
The real novelty is the theorization of a “competition of legitimacy” in support of this reduction of the purpose of the RIP. Thus, the Head of State explains to us, there would be two legitimacies, that of the people and that of Parliament, and the important thing would be to guarantee that one does not encroach on the other. This position seems untenable to us since, as stipulated article 3 of the Constitution, there is only one sovereign, the people, and that their sovereignty is not exercised only by the choice of those who govern but also by the referendum. The result is that popular legitimacy prevails over parliamentary legitimacy in matters of legislation. Which, concretely, means that there is no anomaly in the people being able to interfere with the will of Parliament; but, conversely, Parliament must not be able to call into question the popular will too easily, as it did in 2007 by adopting the Lisbon Treaty, in other words by ignoring the result of the 2005 referendum.
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