“Anyone who would give you a clear, crisp, precise explanation of the situation is wishful thinking. Nobody knows where it’s going. » From his office, rue de Vaugirard, Claude Malhuret, president of the Independents, Republic and Territories group in the Senate, does not hide his perplexity when discussing the months that have just passed in Parliament. What can even be said of what is being played out at the Palais-Bourbon today? From shock to euphoria, to increasingly exacerbated tensions in the Hemicycle, linked to legislative elections which have shaken all certainties, here comes the time for the first disillusions in this National Assembly under a relative majority.
Saturday, December 17, a last motion of censure of the New People’s Ecological and Social Union must be examined before the suspension, for three weeks, of parliamentary work. This is the eleventh attempt by the left to overthrow the government since the beginning of the legislature. Although it has no chance of succeeding, it is a question, for its signatories, of responding to each recourse to article 49, paragraph 3, of the Constitution, the tenth use of which was made on Thursday, by the Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, to have the 2023 state budget adopted without a vote.
These seventy days allotted to the examination of the budgetary texts gave rise to a large deviation from the executive: from the consultation symbolized by the “dialogues of Bercy”, in September, to the “forced passages” denounced by the oppositions, deprived of debates in the Hemicycle. The fault of a 49.3 whose Constitution authorizes an unlimited use on the bills of law of finance and financing of the “Safety”. “We went from Bercy dialogues to Matignon monologue”quips the “rebellious” chairman of the finance committee, Eric Coquerel. “The budget is a parenthesis”, likes to repeat the President of the National Assembly, Yaël Braun-Pivet, in the face of the frustrations expressed by the deputies of all sides.
Deserted benches
The strategy of the presidential camp finds its legitimacy through the opposition’s refusal to vote on the budget, a traditional sign of belonging to a majority. However, two amending budgets – one this summer, the other in the fall – were adopted with the support or abstention of the opposition. “We know how to do when the oppositions tell us that they will vote for our texts. But if we are told a priori “we will not vote”, then we no longer know how to do “, launches the general rapporteur of the budget to the Assembly, Jean-René Cazeneuve (Renaissance, Gers). Contrary to an extraordinary session which will have seen the reappearance, during the summer, of ideological debates in an often crowded Hemicycle, this stack of 49.3 and its share of motions of censure has gradually anesthetized the discussions, pushing the deputies of each camp to desert the benches.
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