Pension reform: battle is preparing for National Assembly

The examination of the bill in the hemicycle from February 6 promises to be stormy. The government wants to accelerate the debates by reducing parliamentary time, the oppositions denounce a misappropriation of the Constitution, all under the pressure of the union dispute in the street.

by Mariama Darame and Jérémie Lamothe

The battle against the pension reform is barely engaged in the street that the one in Parliament is already profiled, which promises to be just as unpredictable for the executive. Three years after the reform which aimed to establish a “universal retirement by points”, abandoned on the altar of the health crisis, the government finds itself again confronted with a large -scale union mobilization with the presence, Thursday, January, of 1.12 million people on the streets, according to the Interior Ministry, and more than two million according to the CGT. Object of dispute? The reform project which aims, in particular, to extend the legal retirement age from 62 to 64 years.

If, in February 2020, Edouard Philippe had to use article 49, paragraph 3 of the Constitution despite his plethoric majority to have his text adopted without a vote, the Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, this time saw himself entrusted The heavy task of defending its reform with a relative majority of only 248 elected officials-out of the 289 required in the National Assembly.

Like her predecessor, she will find a united left in front of her – and this time galvanized by the union unit. The new Ecological and Social People’s Popular Union (Nuts) very early displayed its intention to make Emmanuel Macron’s second five -year reform fail by all means. The president of the group La France Insoumise (LFI), Mathilde Panot, threatened, in October 2022, to reproduce the parliamentary obstruction carried out in 2020. “The last time, we were seventeen” rebellious “parliamentarians and planes filed 17,000 Amendments. Today, we are seventy-five … “

The new national secretary of Europe Ecologie-les Verts, Marine Tondelier, promised on Thursday morning a “National Assembly transformed into ZAD”. “There will be no parliamentary debate, there will be parliamentary obstruction,” deplores the Northern Horizons in advance, Paul Christophe, evoking the examination of the text that arrives in the hemicycle on February 6 .

“truncated legislative debate”

Wanting to protect itself from this threat, the government has found an article in the Constitution which had so far been used for a reform of this nature: article 47, paragraph 1. It frames the conditions and the Deadlines for examining social security financing bills (PLFSS). In the fall, the executive had planned to go through an amendment to the PLFSS, before giving up under pressure from his relative majority. It is ultimately by a supply bill for social security financing (PLFRSS) – whose initial text was adopted in December without vote after five 49.3 – that the executive intends to lead its reform. With a fully found interest: go as quickly as possible in the parliamentary process.

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/Media reports cited above.