After 49.3, and the motions of censure… the shared initiative referendum? This could be the new sequence of a political crisis that is bogged down in France around the very unpopular pension reform that Emmanuel Macron is trying to impose on his opposition: this Monday, March 20, the left submitted to the Constitutional Council a request for a referendum of shared initiative, or “RIP”, as a new component of protest. Like the institution, let us look at the conditions necessary for its establishment, and its possible effects.
How do you trigger a RIP?
To trigger a RIP, a fifth of parliamentarians must vote in favor. This is currently the case. Some 250 parliamentarians, deputies and senators, mainly from the left, support the RIP, while the pension reform has just been adopted in Parliament. The oppositions are playing one of their last cards there, while Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne triggered 49.3 to pass these measures, and the motions of censure, which were to defeat the government, did not succeed.
If the Constitutional Council must now check that any citizen consultation that would result from it does indeed relate to the areas of “the organization of public powers, reforms relating to economic, social or environmental policy and the public services that contribute to it”, provided for by law. Then could open the collection of citizen signatures, in an attempt to reach a tenth of voters, or 4.87 million signatures, within nine months. If that many votes are obtained, then the referendum can be organised.
What do those who propose the RIP say?
In their text, the left-wing parliamentarians judge that the “choice of extending working hours accentuates social inequalities and is particularly harmful to the most vulnerable populations”. They propose to submit to a referendum the fact that retirement “cannot be fixed beyond sixty-two years”.
Is a RIP possible on the pension reform?
Complex procedure, the shared initiative referendum (RIP) has never succeeded since its introduction in the Constitution in 2008, on the initiative of Nicolas Sarkozy, recalls the information site of the French State, Life-Public.fr. A request for RIP had been launched in 2019-2020 to challenge the privatization of Aéroports de Paris, but stopping at just over a million signatures, below the necessary threshold. To collect votes, the Ministry of the Interior must set up a platform. Citizens must then register, bring their identity card… steps which may seem trivial, but which are often discouraging.
But, at the same time, the opposition is strong against the postponement of the age contained in the pension reform. According to an IFOP survey for The Expresscarried out on a representative sample of 1,005 people, only a third of French people (36%) consider that the two-year decline in the legal retirement age is something acceptable.
More than two-thirds of French people find the use of 49.3 unjustified, indicated the same pollster, in another poll, published on March 16, for the Sunday newspaper. As it stands, therefore, it is theoretically possible that the RIP will garner such massive support.
When will we have an answer?
The Constitutional Council should take about a month to decide on the validity of the RIP request. Then the 4.8 million votes will have to be collected within 9 months. See you at the end of autumn 2023, for a first step. If everything is in place for the organization of a referendum, it can still be rejected, if parliamentarians organize new debates in the National Assembly around the retirement age. They have 6 months to do so after the collection of votes, according to the Ministry of the Interior. So the answer… in a year and a half, at least. And in the meantime, the pension reform is not frozen.