It’s a phrase that sounds like a warning. “If there were to be an obstruction, we will simply use all constitutional means and those of our regulations”, warned Gérard Larcher, President of the Senate, in an article of FigaroWednesday March 1, 2023. A way of evoking, implicitly, the use of article 38 of the Senate rules, introduced in 2015 but never used to date, which makes it possible to accelerate the closing of the debates.
The latter provides that when at least two speakers of a contrary opinion have spoken in the general discussion of a text, on an entire article or in the explanations of vote relating to an amendment, an article or the whole text under discussion, the President of the Senate, a group president or the president of the committee concerned – that of Social Affairs – may propose the end of the discussion. The “closing” is then adopted or not by the senators by a vote “sitting and rising”, according to the regulations.
Concretely, this article therefore makes it possible to speed up the discussions within the upper house. In the context of the examination of the pension reform, the issue is crucial. While the National Assembly has failed to go beyond Article 2, due to the 20,000 amendments tabled, the President of the Senate Gérard Larcher intends to go “to the end of the debate”. “The Senate owes citizens and social partners a debate on the entire text,” he said. For his part, the boss of LR senators in the Senate, Bruno Retailleau, asks “[ses] left-wing colleagues [s’ils] undertake not to resort to blocking”, and also envisages the use of “democratic instruments”.
“A Stroke”
Statements that were quick to react to elected left. “It is a procedural instrument which could become the tool of a coup against the opposition in the Senate. If article 38 were to be used, we would still be intimidated”, assures Laurence Rossignol, PS vice-president of the Senate, France info.
“It’s a kind of 49.3, Senate model. It’s really a terrible cleaver”, reacted meanwhile the president of the socialist group in the Senate, Patrick Kanner, on Public Senate. And the elected representative from the North warns the senatorial majority that “individual amendments have been tabled to prevent the use of the famous article 38 to allow us to express ourselves anyway”. With “less than 500 amendments tabled for the socialist group”, the strategy of Patrick Kanner and the socialists does not seem to be parliamentary obstruction, according to him.
For its part, the presidential camp, a minority in the Senate but which has reached an agreement on the essentials of its text with LR, minimizes the hypothesis of recourse to article 38. “It is nevertheless difficult to use. Its use is binding”, insists François Patriat, who chairs the group of Macronist senators at the Luxembourg Palace. “We can’t do it either on 500 amendments in a row.” Especially since the reaction of the street, which provides for 250 demonstrations on Tuesday March 7, could still be tense with the use of such an article.