François Bayrou did not appreciate, to put it mildly, to see such a sparse hemicycle during the budgetary debates in the National Assembly. Especially when this absenteeism concerns the deputies of the government camp… “Having parliamentarians who consider (…) that they have better things to do than be present on their benches in the National Assembly, it is purely and simply unacceptable”, denounced the boss of MoDem this Sunday, October 27 on BFMTV.
The president of the Democratic Movement notably judged “criminal” and “indefensible” the weak presence of elected officials who sit with the majority during the vote on the envelope allocated to the European Union, first planed by the National Rally, then rejected from the left. “We not only have rights when we are parliamentarians. We have duties and the duty of a parliamentarian is to sit on these benches in the Assembly. And there are no excuses to make” , insisted François Bayrou.
Each deputy “is free to exercise his or her activity”
At the same time, the Macronist deputy Roland Lescure (EPR) explained to the RTL-M6-Le Figaro-Public Senate Grand Jury that the fact of “sitting in front of an alliance of opposites which regularly defeats you” makes it “more difficult to be completely mobilized. And the President of the Assembly, Yaël Braun-Pivet, stressed on France 3 that each deputy “is free to vote (and) in their activity”, and that “many deputies are not in the hemicycle because ‘they are simply in committees’, where other texts are examined in parallel.
In the absence of a majority present to vote for the law, François Bayrou predicted “with certainty” that “what will be retained” in the budget, “is what the government will consider to be acceptable”, via recourse to 49.3, a ” very powerful and very justified weapon” which “we will realize in the coming months is vital”.
The government can decide to activate 49.3 five times per text, at the risk of a litany of motions of censure, as former Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne did in 2022 and 2023. It can also play on constitutional deadlines or votes of rejection in the Assembly to use this weapon only once per text during the final vote.