A possible emergency exit if the government finds itself in a dead end to adopt the increase in the retirement age? From a constitutional point of view, nothing would prevent the Senate, which had begun to study the pension reform by points, after its approval by the National Assembly in 2020, from seizing the text of the old pension reform bill for the first time. from Macron. five-year term in the coming weeks.
Far from the philosophy of the current pension reform defended by the Government, Emmanuel Macron had campaigned in 2017 for a points system that intended to calculate the retirement pension no longer based on the 25 best years of career but on a set of accumulated points. during professional life. .
“If tomorrow someone wants to reactivate it, it is possible”
After several days of strikes, the point pension reform was finally adopted at the Palais-Bourbon by 49.3 in February 2020 when Édouard Philippe was prime minister, in front of a sharply divided majority.
The Senate then seized the text on March 4. But on March 16, Emmanuel Macron announced the lockdown linked to Covid-19 and the suspension of all ongoing reforms. The ultimate withdrawal of points will never be submitted to a vote by the senators and therefore will never be deployed.
Which leaves the possibility for the Luxembourg Palace or the government to go to the end of the parliamentary process left on hold for almost 3 years.
“Where in the National Assembly all the texts that have not been voted at the end of the mandate disappear, the Senate is a permanent assembly. If tomorrow someone wants to reactivate the examination of the pension reform bill, it is quite possible,” Jean-Philippe Derosier, professor of public law at the University of Lille, told BFMTV.com.
An unlikely hypothesis
With two options on the table: the first is that of an executive who is in command and who can reintroduce the text on the agenda of the Senate or the upper house that decides on its own to seize the bill.
“On paper everything works fine. But I don’t see why the Senate would want to take up this text again. And I don’t see why the government would present a bill for which it would be very surprising if it had a majority. of senators”, deciphers Benjamin Morel, professor of public law at Paris-2.
The hypothesis that the executive is in great political difficulty seems less likely. 72% of the French say they are opposed to the pension reform according to a poll by Elabe for BFMTV. The distrust contributed to the departure of the Minister of Relations with Parliament, who recognized that women would be “slightly penalized” by the reform.
The unions and the left, for their part, present a united front against retirement at 64 and hope to mobilize very widely on January 31 after the strike on January 19, which was one of the most followed in the last 3 decades. .
Source: BFM TV
