Emmanuel Macron invited his majority leaders to a breakfast at the Élysée on Thursday morning in what looks like a crisis meeting at the start of a crucial day for his pension reform, with tension still high over the outcome of a vote planned for the afternoon in the National Assembly.
A dilemma has to be decided with the head of state, Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne, several ministers and the leaders of the presidential camp in the National Assembly: Go to a very tight and risky vote or often use Article 49.3 as a compulsory passage.
Late on Wednesday evening, after further ministerial consultations, Emmanuel Macron said he wanted to vote on this reform. But “nothing has been decided,” a source inside the executive branch said.
After weeks of heated debates and high-tension negotiations, Emmanuel Macron’s extremely unpopular pension reform should in principle have its parliamentary epilogue on Thursday.
A compromise sealed on Wednesday between seven MPs and seven senators after more than eight hours of debate behind closed doors at a joint joint committee (CMP) paved the way for a vote in the two assemblies on the project, which dates back 64 years Age.
The text, which is integrated into a small committee, will be examined in the right-wing Senate from 9 a.m., with little doubt about the positive result of the vote.
But from 3 p.m. onwards, all the spotlights will be on, especially in the direction of the Palais Bourbon, because the outcome of the vote there is still uncertain. The government is dependent on right-wing Les Républicains MPs, who are divided and far more skeptical of the reform than their fellow senators.
If the government were to invoke Article 49.3 of the Constitution, the text would be adopted without a vote unless a motion of censure is adopted.
LR MPs split
The President of the Republic “wants to make sure that the conditions are met” to go to the vote, pointed out on Wednesday evening at the Elysée, while the mutual counts always come to the same conclusion: the result will be within a few votes.
Should such a vote be lost, Emmanuel Macron and his interlocutors are considering the possibility of dissolving the assembly, majority leaders said.
The President of the Republic plays a major role in this parliamentary sequence. The rest of his second five-year term and his ability to reform France depend on it.
The presidential camp does not have an absolute majority in the assembly. And the concessions granted to LR MPs, particularly on their long-career device hobbyhorse, did not allay doubts about the voting intentions of MPs from this undisciplined group.
“In my group, as in the majority, there are MEPs who do not want to vote for this reform,” admitted its leader Olivier Marleix on Wednesday, after welcoming the “progress” he believes is being made in the CPM became.
Some of them did not hide their whims.
The MEP for the Territoire de Belfort Ian Boucard, who thus estimates the number of opponents of the text among his LR colleagues at “between 15 and 20”, declared after a meeting of his group on Wednesday evening that he “continue to vote against he is ” against a postponement of the retirement age”.
“Better a 49.3 than no reform at all,” was the head of the LR senators, Bruno Retailleau, appraising the text very benevolently, as if he wanted to downplay the benefits of this procedure on Thursday would be the hundredth since the beginning of the Fifth Republic.
“Nothing’s Over”
The opposition would describe the lack of a vote as an anti-democratic act which union leaders said would likely harden the social movement.
“Nothing is over,” warned Insoumis MEP leader Mathilde Panot, announcing that her group would vote on Thursday in favor of the motion tabled by the small group of independent MEPs Liot in the assembly to reject the reform.
“And then we will proceed with all the tools at our disposal: referral to the Constitutional Council, motion of no confidence and the rest we will tell you later,” she said.
On the social front, following Wednesday’s demonstrations (which brought together 1.7 million people according to the CGT and 480,000 people according to the Interior Ministry), the union “solemnly” urged parliamentarians to vote against the reform.
This reform “is detached from the concrete reality of work,” stressed CFDT Secretary General Laurent Berger.
But the movement is showing some signs of running out of steam. The demonstrators are fewer in numbers on the streets and in key sectors such as transport, the strikes do not last or are hardly pursued.
At a meeting in Chevilly-Larue on Wednesday night, Left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon tried to prevent his troops from withdrawing in advance.
“We are the force because we are the many. (…) Don’t let yourself be robbed,” he encouraged her.