While the mobilization does not weaken in the street, the fight continues on the political ground. The request for a shared initiative referendum (RIP), initiated by the left to challenge the pension reform, was submitted to the Constitutional Council on Monday, said the institution which will examine its admissibility. Some 250 parliamentarians, deputies and senators, mainly from the left, have tabled it, while the reform has just been adopted in Parliament.
In their text, the left-wing parliamentarians judge that the “choice of extending working hours accentuates social inequalities and is particularly harmful to the most vulnerable populations”. They propose to submit to a referendum the fact that retirement “cannot be fixed beyond sixty-two years”.
The Council must now verify its admissibility, in particular by looking at whether the consultation relates to the areas of “the organization of public authorities, reforms relating to economic, social or environmental policy and the public services which contribute to it”. If the Elders deem the request admissible, the collection of citizen signatures could begin, in an attempt to reach one tenth of voters, i.e. 4.87 million signatures, within nine months, to pave the way for a referendum. “It’s long, it could only start in May,” explained the leader of the rebellious Jean-Luc Mélenchon, this Monday during a press briefing at the Assembly.
A complex procedure, the shared initiative referendum (RIP) has never succeeded since its introduction into the Constitution in 2008, on the initiative of Nicolas Sarkozy. A request for RIP had been launched in 2019-2020 to challenge the privatization of Aéroports de Paris, but stopping at just over a million signatures, below the necessary threshold. However, the government had suspended its privatization project due to the coronavirus crisis which had hit the air transport sector hard.