The major political initiative so announced by Emmanuel Macron is vaguely taking shape. And with it a “preferendum” project, which also remains very vague. In this context, this Wednesday, August 30, the President of the Republic will receive the parties represented in Parliament at the education center of the Legion of Honor in Saint-Denis.
According to government spokesman Olivier Véran, this “afternoon of work that the President of the Republic wishes to be productive” must be organized around “several axes”. “First the international axis but also on how to make a nation, on the return of authority, on immigration issues”, he detailed, Monday August 28 during an interview on RMC-BFMTV. While each of the party leaders is invited to come up with proposals, “nothing is sorted, nothing is predetermined”, assured the government spokesperson, not hesitating to qualify the meeting as a “democratic innovation “. “They have ideas, proposals to make to us. The President says to them: ‘Come with it, we are going to do something for the French.'”
In a letter addressed to the parties, the Head of State for his part underlined that the objective was to build “together” legislative texts and open the way, “if necessary”, to referendums. And Olivier Véran to specify during his interview on the news channel that the president is also “open” to testing “a preferendum”. A concept that remains to be defined.
An unknown but applicable concept
For the constitutionalist Didier Maus, also president emeritus of the French association of constitutional law, “the notion of ‘preferendum’ is new, however one can imagine that it supposes that there is something before the referendum”. Olivier Véran, however, tried to explain it otherwise. “It’s a concept that would allow us to test several subjects at the same time during the same vote. You can ask multiple questions to the French,” he argued.
In other words, it would be a matter of proposing two or more questions during the same referendum. Bring together several questions in the referendum process. Is it constitutionally possible? “The idea of holding several referendums on the same day does not pose any legal problem”, assures Didier Maus, adding once again that he does not know what exactly the notion of “preferendum” corresponds to. “It is simply necessary that each of the referendums has its own identity and conforms to Article 11 of the Constitution”.
If the term “preferendum” is still unknown, Didier Maus notes however that in October 1945, at the end of the Second World War two questions were put to the French on the same day of the referendum. The first questioned a possible return to the Third Republic or the transition to a Fourth Republic. If necessary, the second question asked the French if they accepted the provisional constitutional rules to prepare the Fourth Republic.
The question of the referendum back on the table
This is not the first time that Emmanuel Macron has raised the possibility of having recourse to a referendum or a similar measure, such as the RIP (referendum of shared initiative). At the time of the yellow vests crisis, in 2019, the president had thus proposed to renovate it and in particular to lower the quorum. He also came back on the table last winter during the controversial pension reform.
Although Emmanuel Macron often speaks of a referendum, the last one nevertheless dates back to 2005. Last August, political scientist Olivier Rozenberg, associate professor at Sciences Po, researcher at the Center for European Studies and Comparative Politics explained to L’Express that “Macron is a Gaullist without the referendum. Like the general, he is wary of intermediary bodies, can mistreat Parliament but he does not counterbalance this verticality through the referendum. The confrontation in front of the cameras with angry citizens during his travels is a poor quality substitution, even if it is quite good at the exercise. In fact, the last referendum took place eighteen years ago and ended in a resounding ‘no’: the legitimacy of the then president, Jacques Chirac, was affected by it until his departure from the Elysée.
If the executive still seems to be fumbling on the issue, the opposition parties have already expressed their determination to submit to the president, during the meeting on Wednesday August 30, a referendum proposal. On the side of the Republicans of Eric Ciotti, it would be a question of questioning the French on immigration while the left considers that it is the question of the pension reform adopted on March 17 which should be asked.