2023-07-11 12:00:19
It was understood by those who initiated it that the pension reform would pass “whatever the cost”, despite the determined and justified opposition of a majority of French people. The purpose and content of this reform carry the seeds of a lasting social divide, while the employment market in France remains structurally unfavorable to seniors, moreover at a time when the French are suffering from the deterioration of public services, in particular the health and education systems, and the inflation which inexorably impoverishes them.
While our Constitution stipulates in its first article that “France is a (…) democratic and social Republic”, this reform, where social dialogue has been reduced to a purely formal exercise of consultation, undermines the necessary protection and social cohesion to which the French people are viscerally attached. If the Constitutional Council considered that the examination of this reform did not contain any legal flaws, it is nonetheless flawed from a democratic point of view. This political sequence will leave deep traces. It forces us to redefine what deliberative democracy is.
It definitively marks the end of the exception, of the parenthesis of a political excess that President Emmanuel Macron carried in 2017, dependent on a political system which, as he himself described during the last presidential campaign, is not parliamentary and which could bring to power a populist right, the opportunist receptacle of all the suffering, of all the feelings of exasperation that run through French society. Aware of this risk but forgetful of what is parliamentary about the regime, its margins of action are very limited.
La Nupes an inevitable and desirable burst
It condemns the next four years of this final five-year term to become the scene of a hostile and hopeless confrontation with the French. And it is not the future debates on immigration or the latest sweeping declarations on the fraud of social benefits (while that of social security contributions is much greater) that will allow us to consider an appeasement…
To incarnate tomorrow an overcoming of traditional political borders, it is necessary to redefine a new social contract with the French. For that, it is necessary that the republican left of government finds the way of the political power. The pension reform has demonstrated this: there is no left in the presidential majority.
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