While opposition to the now enacted bill is not diminishing, it would be a real political turnaround.
Immediately promulgated, immediately withdrawn? It would not be so easy, but the pension reform could once again find itself in difficulties before Parliament. While the legislative path of the text has come to an end and now there is no longer any recourse on this bill, another way would be considered by certain politicians to try to have these new provisions withdrawn, in particular the postponement legal retirement age from 62 to 64 years old.
After parliamentary debates limited to 15 days (National Assembly and Senate combined), numerous strikes and demonstrations since mid-January bringing together up to 3.5 million people according to the unions, but also appeals filed before the Constitutional Council , the voice of opponents of the pension reform has not been heard. Emmanuel Macron, Elisabeth Borne and the Macronist deputies and senators, helped by a few elected LRs, went to the end of their project, at all costs. Emmanuel Macron’s speech on the issue was not the sign of any mea culpa, just a regret over the lack of consensus around this major societal reform.
Why the law could pass
A consensus that want to find, for their part, deputies of the Freedoms, Independents, Overseas and Territories (LIOT) group to repeal the pension reform. These elected officials have an idea in mind for this: to use their parliamentary niche of June 8 – it allows any political group to have the Assembly study only its own bills for one day – to submit to the vote of the Bourbon Palace a bill to repeal the pension reform.
The LIOT group had made itself known to the general public during the vote of the motion of censure after the commitment of article 49.3 of the Constitution by Elisabeth Borne to have the text adopted by the Assembly without the vote of the deputies. This motion of censure of the government, which they had tabled, had failed by 9 votes, narrowly failing to overthrow the executive power in place. This required an absolute majority in the National Assembly.
Bis repetita with their new bill? Not so sure. Indeed, in this context, a relative majority is enough to have a text adopted, that is to say a majority of votes according to the number of voters. In the case of a positive outcome at the initiative of LIOT, it would however remain to convince the Senate, mainly in favor of the pension reform. The bill is still far from being there, but the possibility of a repeal of the pension reform does exist.