An the evening of his victory, Emmanuel Macron declared: “I also know that many of our compatriots voted for me today, not to support the ideas I hold, but to block those of the extreme right. I want to thank them here. I am aware that this vote binds me for the years to come. » Six months later, the government has just had recourse four times to article 49.3 of the Constitution, with which it can engage its responsibility on a text which is then adopted without a vote.
Beyond their institutional dimensions, these unprecedented uses of 49.3 at the very beginning of the five-year term, which we can think will multiply, take on a singular significance in the political context, and are the sign of a serious decline in the democratic culture in our country. The government cannot hide it by deporting the debate on the vote by the RN of the motion of censure of the Nupes.
These are not trivial texts on which the government has chosen to prohibit Parliament from commenting. They relate to State and Social Security receipts, and decide on the amount of taxes and social security contributions. However, in many countries, parliament was created precisely to ensure that there is democratic consent to taxation. Observers have noted that this practice was not new, that most governments used it under the Fifth Republic, and that even a great democrat like Michel Rocard had used 49.3 a record twenty-eight times.
The context of a historic democratic crisis
The same observers recalled that the constitutional revision adopted in 2008 under the mandate of Nicolas Sarkozy made it possible to limit its use to one bill per session, apart from the budgetary texts. What these observers forget to say is that it limits the use of 49.3, except for the adoption of the most important texts of the legislature and which have often justified the very existence of our modern Parliaments, during their creation. This is a very singular conception of the role of Parliament.
In addition to the fact that the use of 49.3 has most often ended badly for the executives who have chosen such a forced transition – whether one thinks of the first employment contract (CPE) of Dominique de Villepin, in 2006, or Manuel Valls’ labor law ten years later – the use of this article, in the context of a historic democratic crisis, takes on a completely different meaning today.
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