2023-11-24 13:40:13
FRANCE – On Wednesday, November 22, the Senate rejected the bill aimed at facilitating the use of the shared initiative referendum (RIP). Despite a context of strong electoral abstention and in which Parliament lives to the rhythm of 49.3, it seems that the Upper House is still not ready to give up on direct democracy.
This Thursday, November 23, Elisabeth Borne triggered article 49 paragraph 3 of the Constitution for the 18th time. Abstention in the last French presidential elections recorded a record figure of 28.01%. Worse still, the first round of the 2021 regional elections was shunned by no less than 66.7% of voters.
It is in this context of great popular distrust that Senator Yan Chantrel, member of the socialist, environmentalist and republican group (SER) suggested to Parliament a text which makes the representation of citizens in democratic life a little easier. This was without counting the rejection of 224 senators out of 326 votes cast.
A proposal to facilitate the referendum
Since 2008, it has actually been possible to submit a bill directly to popular vote. However, the mechanism provided for in Article 11 of the Constitution meets such strict conditions that it has never seen the light of day. The text proposal defended by Yan Chantrel therefore intended to make some modifications to make the process more flexible.
Thus, the senator proposed to broaden the scope of the referendum to the tax question and to laws which are not only reforms, to lower the thresholds for signatures of parliamentarians and voter support required to implement the RIP, to create a second type of referendum proposed directly by citizens (and no longer only by the President of the Republic or by parliamentarians), and finally, to impose the holding of an RIP when a proposed law has not been not been expressly rejected by both houses of Parliament.
Compared to the current regime, all these proposals had at least the merit of suggesting that the organization of a referendum was no longer an improbable hypothesis.
No RIP completed the process
Because at present, to trigger the RIP procedure, a fifth of Parliament, or 185 parliamentarians, must support the proposal, as well as 4.7 million voters registered on the lists. Then, the areas on which parliamentarians have the possibility of questioning the people concern only “the organization of public authorities, economic, social or environmental policy or the ratification of an international treaty”. Finally, the proposed law to which the RIP relates must at all costs constitute a reform.
Suffice to say that to date, none of the five RIP projects has completed the process. In 2020, regarding the status of Paris airports, the Constitutional Council noted that the necessary threshold of popular support had not been reached. More recently, on the thorny issue of the retirement age, he again dismissed it for purely formal reasons, considering that the pension reform was not really a reform.
And yet, the arguments put forward by the socialist, environmentalist and republican group (SER) to put an end to these blocking situations have not convinced the Senate, starting with the commission’s rapporteur Phillipe Bas (LR).
Activists and pressure groups worry
“Having to mobilize 48 million voters because a million of them decided that a subject should be put to the French vote is an approach that poses a problem to me,” he began by admitting in a public session. “To collect a million signatures, all it takes is for a pressure group armed with activists, or even activists, to mobilize, let’s be very careful!”
It is also not certain that the referendum should be trivialized:“Should we privatize Paris airport? If you ask the French, are you sure you will get more than 10 or 15% participation? This is the best way to kill the RIP!”
Finally, he was concerned that the bill did not leave more room for examination by the Constitutional Council, the same one which has rejected four out of five RIP proposals since 2008…
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