Institutions are going to have ringing ears this week. They certainly end up getting used to it, but that’s not reassuring. Pending its decision, Friday, April 14, on the amending social security financing bill and therefore on the pension reform, the Constitutional Council, its composition, its role, its place will be in the eye of the cyclone. Everyone will want to do politics rather than law. It would be very wrong to deprive ourselves of wondering about this instance – which is the subject of eight articles of our fundamental law -, and it is not the prerogative of the extremes. Nicolas Sarkozy, who advocates the creation of a kind of Supreme Court, or Valérie Pécresse, during the last presidential campaign, had thought about the question.
But the winds are bad. Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the Insoumis, for example, clearly show their desire to overthrow the institutions. In March, the president of the LFI group in the Assembly, Mathilde Panot, succeeded in casting opprobrium on the mixed parity committee, once the place par excellence of parliamentary discussion in the best sense of the word – the search for a consensus –, now denounced as the height of opacity. In April, it is therefore the turn of the nine Sages of the Palais-Royal to face the turmoil. LFI will not hesitate to resort to the dishonest practice of “name and shame” if the decision has the misfortune to displease it.
The Fifth Republic is almost 65 years old (it came into force on October 4, 1958, ratified by 82% of voters), it even seems that it would have reached retirement age. The last electoral sequence, the most powerful that exists, namely the presidential followed by the legislative elections in 2022, showed the difficulty in producing legitimacy, which in fact refers to an existential problem.
“It is true that, by an oddity which comes rather from nature than from the minds of men, it is sometimes necessary to change certain laws. But the case is rare; and when it happens, it must not be touched. than with a trembling hand”: the famous recommendation of Montesquieu in the Persian letters cannot be forgotten. Let us remember the last constitutional referendum, that of 2000, which introduced the five-year term instead of the seven-year term. Almost everyone today would like to come back to the length of the presidential mandate. Let us remember the last constitutional revision, which certainly introduced the QPC (Priority Questions of Constitutionality), almost unanimously welcomed, but also the prohibition of a third consecutive presidential term, a measure now much decried. When we touch institutions, we know more easily what we are losing than what we are gaining.