The room is nestled on the 1st floor of the Palais Bourbon. 72 deputies are called every day to meet within the social affairs commission, one of these antechambers of the factory of the law. Debates on unemployment insurance or labor law punctuate the exchanges in a cozy atmosphere. Nothing like this Wednesday, May 31. The body was a furnace, the nerve center of French political life. Deputies from the majority and the opposition continued their war of nerves there around the Liot group’s bill aimed at repealing the pension reform.
By removing the return of the legal retirement age to 62, the majority won a major victory in its battle to prevent a vote from being held on June 8 in the National Assembly. The government is indeed terrified of losing such a symbolic vote. But this success has a cost: the oppositions denounce “parliamentary deceit” and a violation of the right of amendment. Life under relative majority promises to be boiling. “It’s a shipwreck for everyone, notes a Renaissance deputy. The Assembly appeared as a place of maneuvers, and not a place of decision-making. All this damages the functioning of our institutions.”
A decisive vote
The battle of May 31 was decisive in the war led by the executive in Liot. The passage of the text in committee was the first step in the government’s strategy to declare the law financially inadmissible under Article 40 of the Constitution. This text prohibits any PPL or amendment from worsening public finances. The majority has a simple idea: delete article 1 of the text repealing the passage to 64 years, force the Liot group to redeposit it in the form of an amendment in public session, and then leave the President of the Assembly Yaël Braun-Pivet declare the amendment inadmissible. The member for Yvelines is indeed reluctant to convene a new office of the Assembly – the body decided at the end of April – to bury the text.
This Wednesday, the plan is ready. Debates begin at 9:30 a.m. The atmosphere is tense, the room is too cramped to accommodate journalists and deputies from other committees who have come as spectators. The roles are distributed: Liot defends “parliamentary democracy”, the majority castigates a “communication coup”. At 11:50 am, article 1 (the PPL has 3) on the return to 62 years of age is deleted by 38 votes against 34. The contribution of a majority of LR votes is decisive.
End of the story ? Quite the contrary. This failure does not extinguish the hopes of the left. The substantive discussions are followed by technical manoeuvres. “We have to find all the ways for this vote in the hemicycle to take place, confides LFI deputy Alexis Corbière. We can play on the rules.” The Nupes then seeks to scuttle the rest of the text by voting against. According to the regulations, the initial version of the bill would then have been submitted to the Assembly. It is a failure… The majority votes for article 2.
Maneuvers and Obstruction
There remains the good old obstruction. If the text is not voted on by June 5 at 5 p.m., it also leaves in its first version in the hemicycle. More than 3000 sub-amendments are tabled by the Nupes to slow down the debates. The president of the Commission Fadila Khattabi then refuses to examine them under article 41 of the regulations of the National Assembly, which gives her the power to organize the “work” of the body.
Faced with protests from the opposition, the MP urgently summons the office of the commission… which confirms its decision. “Yes for the debate, no to the obstruction!” Says Fadila Khattabi. Here is the disarmed Nupes. At 3 p.m., the left-wing deputies left the room in protest. “You have denied the right of amendment of parliamentarians. This is unprecedented in parliamentary history”, loose the socialist Arthur Delaporte. Free then to the majority to approve the last two articles of the text. It’s done at 4 p.m.
“We collectively shot ourselves in the foot”
At first sight, this election is a victory for the executive. His strategy is a success, all the conditions are met so that the deputies do not vote for the PPL Liot on June 8. But at what cost ? The image of “boatswain” will stick to the majority, the Nupes is returned to his taste for obstruction. Never has the tension between the two camps been so strong. The president of the LFI group Mathilde Panot denounces “an undemocratic coup by Macronie”, when her Renaissance counterpart Aurore Bergé castigates the “insults and threats” suffered by the deputies of the majority. “We collectively shot ourselves in the foot,” said a Renaissance MP. The presidential camp, by dramatizing the stakes of the vote, made a banal day in committee a political event. To his detriment.
All eyes are now on Yaël Braun-Pivet. The President of the Assembly will be responsible for triggering Article 40 by June 8. The majority approves, but fears the consequences of such an act on parliamentary life. “Article 40 is a cataclysm, loose a Horizons framework. This would lead to the blocking of the Assembly and this text would return in another form in another niche.” The LFI president of the finance committee Eric Coquerel is in favor of filing a motion of censure in the event of recourse to article 40. A Renaissance pillar wonders: “Lost vote or article 40? Is it the plague or cholera.” For the majority, sure. For the functioning of the Assembly, the debate is open.