Will it go beyond the proposal stage this time? During his annual greetings, Tuesday, December 31, Emmanuel Macron once again suggested that he could appeal to the vote of the French in a possible referendum in 2025 – without, however, clearly exposing this possibility. “In 2025, I will ask you to decide on some of these determining issues. Each of you will have a role to play,” underlined the President of the Republic, during a speech lasting around ten minutes.
The use of a referendum is far from being addressed for the first time by Emmanuel Macron since his accession to the Elysée in 2017. However, he has never taken the step of organizing a ballot of this type. But, after a dissolution which the Head of State himself admitted on Tuesday evening that it had brought “more instability than serenity” and a fragmented hemicycle to the National Assembly, the possibility of this kind of call to the polls constitutes one of the last assets to play for the executive in order to regain more political weight.
Constitutional revision and the “yellow vest” crisis
As soon as the presidential speech was completed, the opposition, mainly on the left, immediately cast doubt on the possibility of a referendum in the coming months. “It’s communication, he can’t do it,” the LFI president of the Finance Committee of the National Assembly, Eric Coquerel, immediately judged on BFMTV. “Since Emmanuel Macron announces that he wants to resort to a referendum, let him start with a referendum on pensions,” launched the ecologist Sandrine Rousseau on the social network X. “In 2025, Macron discovers democracy,” said for his part ironized the communist leader Fabien Roussel.
Has the idea of a referendum nevertheless made its way into the mind of the French leader in recent weeks? Evoking this option is in any case nothing new for him. Barely coming to power in 2017, Emmanuel Macron brought Parliament together in Congress. Already, he leaves the door open to a referendum scenario. “If it is necessary, I will resort to the vote of our fellow citizens by way of referendum,” he then asked, after having detailed his future reform proposals before the elected officials.
Since then, the president has mentioned on numerous occasions and on different issues the referendum as a possibility ready to be realized. As early as 2019, the proposal was put on the table at the end of the yellow vest crisis. For a time, the organization of a referendum coupled with the European vote that spring had been considered by the executive. While Emmanuel Macron had participated in multiple “major debates” in the previous months, the initiative could have been seen as a way of giving back control to citizens. Ultimately, the project did not come to fruition.
Another example: the constitutional revision of 2018, first suspended then partly resumed in 2021 in another bill, planned to include the preservation of the environment in the French Constitution. A matter for debate between the two Chambers of Parliament, the senators refusing to see the text “guarantee” such a measure. Emmanuel Macron had indicated that he wanted to submit this measure, resulting from the work of the Citizens’ Climate Convention, to a referendum. But, once again, no vote will be planned on this project – it also ultimately fell through.
The limits of article 11
At the end of his first five-year term, the president-candidate did not make the subject of the referendum a key theme of his re-election campaign… but he did not, however, dismiss the tool out of hand, including to make adopt its future pension reform. “I do not wish to exclude it, because our discussions with the French allow us to clarify things,” he explains on this subject on BFMTV. Here again, he will choose not to opt for this path, which is certainly politically risky on such a text.
At the start of 2025, Emmanuel Macron therefore suggests, perhaps, a first use of article 11 of the Constitutionwhich allows the organization of a referendum vote. Unless the president has rather opened the way, during his speech, to the creation of a new citizens’ convention, like the work carried out by dozens of French people on the climate or on the end of life.
“Besides the fact that the word “referendum” was not spoken, the announcement has already been made many times since 2017 […]. Furthermore, subjects such as the end of life or immigration could undoubtedly not be subject to the terms of article 11″, warned the constitutional expert and lecturer in public law at the Panthéon-Assas University Benjamin. Morel, Tuesday evening on Xafter the speech of the President of the Republic.
The specialist refers to the fact that the Constitution allows a legislative referendum to be proposed to the French only on “any bill relating to the organization of public powers, to reforms relating to the economic, social or environmental policy of the nation and to public services which contribute to it, or tending to authorize the ratification of a treaty”.
Emmanuel Macron himself also wanted to broaden the field of possibilities in this area last year. After his exchange during the summer of 2023 with the main French party leaders during the meetings in Saint-Denis, he expressed the wish to “continue” the “reflections on the avenues for development of the referendum”. “It would involve both taking up bills relating to so-called ‘societal’ issues such as the end of life sometimes mentioned, but also broader reforms affecting several intertwined aspects”, like “the questions migratory “, he hoped then, without the file going any further for the moment.