Until the last minute, Emmanuel Macron tried to impose his views on deputies and senators. For the first time since his arrival at the Elysée Palace in 2017, the realities of parliamentary time imposed themselves on the President of the Republic. Contrary to what he wanted, the national elected officials will not sit in September during an extraordinary session. An unprecedented situation in twenty years.
On the evening of Monday July 25, the Head of State and his Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, still favored a return to parliament around September 26 with the first texts presented to the Council of Ministers the week of September 7 or 14. The idea being to show a government and a Parliament hard at work, definitively cutting short the impression of a “power vacuum” after the first sluggish weeks of the second five-year term.
A program, announced Tuesday, July 26 in the morning, during the majority breakfast, which angered the President of the National Assembly, Yaël Braun-Pivet. This immediately alerted Matignon to the political consequences of such short deadlines for the preparation of parliamentary work after exhausting weeks of debate in July. In the aftermath, the Minister responsible for relations with Parliament, Franck Riester, with the approval of the Head of State, finally told the presidents of the groups in the National Assembly that the return to parliament would be set for October 3. Only the president of the elected Renaissance, Aurore Bergé, pleaded to maintain an extraordinary session in September.
“They are no longer the ones who have the upper hand”
The attrition of parliamentarians – who will stop their work at best on August 7 – and the new configuration of the Assembly, without an absolute majority, therefore got the better of the ambitions of the executive and Mme Bank. “The President of the Republic and the government must realize that it is no longer they who have the upper hand, considers the deputy of Yvelines Bruno Millienne (MoDem). That does not mean that we are not faithful and loyal to the presidential program, but we simply cannot continue to work like this. » In the viewfinder of the elected Ile-de-France, these dozens of sessions extended this summer until the middle of the night, with debates in committee and in public session which overlapped.
By postponing the return to parliament for a few days, the presidential camp officially intends to put its new “method of compromise and dialogue”, especially with the elected representatives of the majority and the opposition. But the vagueness remains on the conditions of this work and its temporality. Should the different political groups be consulted during the drafting of bills, in order to integrate the red lines of each other? Should the negotiations await the opinion of the Council of State before presenting the texts to the Council of Ministers? Or should they take place in the National Assembly, between parliamentarians, prior to committee work? Difficult to decide, because the oppositions are still cautious about the idea of being associated with Macronist power.
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