The temperature rose a notch again this Thursday in the chamber on the occasion of the parliamentary niche of La France insoumise. When considering the constitutionalization of abortion, the prohibition of bullfighting and the reinsertion of unvaccinated caregivers, the deputies used all the grammar at their disposal to slow down the debates. The rebels only had until midnight to defend their texts. What pushes the deputies to make the most of the “tools” at their disposal.
• Floods of amendments
All the amendments presented by the deputies must be examined in session, pushing certain parliamentarians who want to delay the debates to sometimes present hundreds of them.
In fact, each amendment can be defended for up to two minutes by the deputies who signed it. Submitting some thirty amendments to a text means guaranteeing up to one hour of speaking time in the chamber. What pushes the deputies to abuse this advantage, like the RN Yoann Gillet.
The Gard deputy thus proposed to replace the title of the bill “Abolish bullfighting: a small step for the animal, a great step for humanity” examined this Thursday afternoon in the Chamber by “erasing bullfighting traditions”, ” erase the passion of the people of the South” or even “impose the ideology of a single man in the bullfighting towns”.
The method has proven its effectiveness: denouncing the “obstruction” of his opponents, the deputy LFI Aymeric Caron, at the origin of this text, has given up defending it.
The same technique was used by the executive on Thursday night during the examination of the text on the reintegration of caregivers defended by the rebels. The presidential field presented a series of subamendments to the text, increasing the number of amendments to the text to be debated from 45 to 316.
• Reminders of the rules
A little more discreet in recent weeks, questions of order have starred at the start of the legislature before reappearing this Thursday night during the debates on unvaccinated hospital staff. It is governed by article 58 of the regulations of the national assemblythey allow a deputy to speak for two minutes on a subject related to their application and the development of the meeting.
The point of order also always takes precedence and therefore suspends the current discussion, allowing the deputies to show their discontent. An adequate tool for macronista deputies, very few in the chamber to ensure the rejection of this text, supported by LFI, RN and LRs.
Example with the Horizons deputy Thomas Mesnier who was moved by the “invective, threats, insults” uttered in the chamber, and deputies who “film themselves on social networks.”
• Session suspensions
The suspension of the session, that is, the pause in the debates, cannot be denied when requested by the government or the rapporteur of a text. Corresponds to dead time in a sports match.
The suspension often allows troops to be withdrawn before a vote in which the government may find itself in trouble. The executive, fearing that he would be in the minority in the reinsertion of unvaccinated caregivers, the interim president of the Renaissance group Sylvain Maillard used and abused it to lengthen the debates and corner his troops.
The maneuver also allowed Olivier Véran, former Minister of Health, now government spokesman, to come 30 minutes before the end of the debates to explain the executive’s position, strongly shaking the chamber… at the risk of provoking a session incident.
• Session incidents
The deputy Olivier Serva (LIOT), who had left the Renaissance group during the previous term, precisely because of the issue of vaccination of hospital staff, launched a loud “You are going to close it”, to the attention of a majority deputy this Thursday for the night.
Enough to push the chair of the session to suspend the debate for five minutes. If this time seems short, it has all its importance when a text must stop being studied at a specific moment, as happened this Thursday night.
In-session incidents were relatively rare during the last term, but were widely used during the very heated debates on Marriage for All in 2013, allowing the debates to drag on for a long time. Christian Jacob, then president of the LR group, had provoked a session incident after denouncing “the sigh” of a Christiane Taubira collaborator who was then defending the text.
Enough to prove that Olivier Véran was wrong, who on Thursday explained that he had “never seen” such a “level of tension” “in 12 years of Parliament.”
Source: BFM TV
