His words sound like an uppercut. The Renaissance President of the National Assembly, Yaël Braun-Pivet, took up her pen on Friday April 7 to call, nine months after taking office on the roost, her fellow deputies to show more consistency in the debates carried out within the hemicycle.
In this letter addressed to all of the 577 deputies elected during the legislative elections of June 2022, she is moved by the “lamentable spectacle” offered in the lower house, punctuated by “heckled sessions”, “interrupted speakers” or even “invectives and cries erupting from all sides”.
This three-page text points above all to the “sad record” of sanctions for “unacceptable or inappropriate behavior”. According to the latest AFP count published in early February, ten sanctions have already been imposed since the start of the new term. Two deputies were even targeted by temporary exclusions. The elected RN Grégoire de Fournas, author of racist remarks in November during a session of questions to the government, had been sidelined for fifteen days. A sanction imitated a few weeks later against Thomas Portes, rebellious deputy who had staged his foot on a ball bearing the image of the Minister of Labor Olivier Dussopt. An unprecedented recurrence.
Only fifteen sanctions had been recorded during the previous five-year term. The figure is even more eloquent when transposed to the entire duration of the Fifth Republic: before 2017, 23 sanctions had been pronounced in the space of sixty years. Faced with this “worrying degradation of the serenity and quality (of the) exchanges”, the member of the majority wished to step up to the plate.
Calls to order
In this letter, the President of the National Assembly recalls the rules to be followed in the hemicycle. She underlines the prohibition “to telephone inside the hemicycle” or to use “any tool of communication with the outside”, in a barely masked allusion to the “live” of deputy Ugo Bernalicis (LFI) on the social network Twitch or to the lavalier microphones worn in session by deputies from different sides, including Aurélien Pradié (LR) for a report by France 2.
Yaël Braun-Pivet also recalls the impossibility of brandishing “signs” in the hemicycle while several dozen deputies, mostly rebellious, illustrated themselves with signs “64 years old, it’s no” singing the Marseillaise on the day the triggering of 49.3 on the law adopting the pension reform. A little earlier in the week, 77 deputies had already received a call to order for this reason.
This gesture, with this letter, does not pass through the ranks of the Nupes. “We are not kids to be punished but deputies who oppose your pension reform. No call to order will silence or scare us,” reacted environmentalist Sandrine Rousseau on Twitter. “These sanctions taken against opposition MPs demonstrate that, far from enforcing the prerogatives of the legislative power, you are no more than an executor of the base works of the executive in its authoritarian turn,” said answered in a letter Mathilde Panot.
The head of daughter of rebellious France intends to challenge these calls to order before the Council of State, or even before the European Court of Human Rights. It is not certain that appeasement will come to the National Assembly anytime soon.