the President of the National Assembly will not block the repeal text of the LIOT group

2023-05-24 10:30:11

As usual, Elisabeth Borne left nothing to show. This Tuesday, May 23, during the traditional majority breakfast at Matignon, the Prime Minister listens, impassive to the arguments of the President of the National Assembly, Yaël Braun-Pivet. With the approach of the examination in committee at the National Assembly, on May 31, of the bill of the group Freedoms, independents, overseas and territories (LIOT) aiming to repeal the pension reform, M^me Braun-Pivet refuses to be the one who, at the perch, will block the vote on a text carried by an opposition group. “She does not want us to trample the National Assembly”, reports his entourage. The subject of pensions, which Emmanuel Macron is painfully trying to put behind him, will therefore, most likely, be invited back into the public debate.

Read also: Article reserved for our subscribers Pensions: the repeal text of the reform puts the majority under pressure

The presidential camp had imagined that M^me Braun-Pivet could convene in extremis the office of the Assembly in order to pronounce the inadmissibility of the text in the name of article 40 of the Constitution, which prohibits the parliamentary initiatives degrading the public accounts. “It is not constitutional (…) to widen the State deficit by 15 billion euros per year, without proposing a coherent financing solution in the face”, further affirmed the government spokesperson, Olivier Véran, Tuesday, May 23, on France Inter.

But Yaël Braun-Pivet’s clear and net refusal dashed the hope of burying LIOT’s initiative as quickly as possible. “You can buy popcorn, the movie isn’t over”, ironically one of his collaborators. On Tuesday afternoon, the president of the social affairs committee, Fadila Khattabi (Renaissance, Côte-d’Or), sent a letter to the president of the finance committee, Eric Coquerel (La France insoumise), asking him to decide on the financial admissibility of the text. “Mr. Coquerel must be faced with his responsibilities”advance M^me Khattabi.

“Febrility of the presidential minority”

The outcome of this initiative is without suspense. The elected Mélenchoniste, strongly opposed to the reform, intends to defend a parliamentary custom: to let the texts of the deputies prosper, including those outside the budgetary nails, so as not to curb the parliamentary initiatives.

This tradition, without major consequences for a power endowed with an absolute majority, gives cold sweats to the executive, which only has a relative majority in the Palais-Bourbon. “The fundamental question is whether we should leave room for clientelist initiatives favoring demagogic one-upmanship”, questions Aurore Bergé, the leader of the Renaissance deputies. For his colleague from Moselle, Ludovic Mendes, the opposition initiative pursues a “sole purpose” : “put pressure on the President of the Republic and further radicalize opponents of the reform”.

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