Get organized to weigh better. Deputies of the presidential majority have heated up a WhatsApp loop in recent days in an attempt to modify the pension reform project that will arrive at the chamber next Monday. Its name sums up its ambition: “Socially yours”.
“We are the pebble in the shoe of the majority. We are here to improve the text and make it fairer”, summarizes one of its members with BFMTV.com in broad strokes.
Influencing a majority on the right than ever before
Among the 25 deputies that make up this group there are many former socialists such as the deputy Stella Dupont, relatives of the former minister Barbara Pompili or former members of Young with Macron such as Ludovic Mendes. It was he who launched this cycle, born during the budget debates last fall.
“I told myself that I had to let colleagues who had just been elected and who did not necessarily know who to turn to to defend their ideas discuss,” explains this former Socialist Party director.
With an imperative: weigh in the debates of a majority whose center of gravity has shifted sharply to the right since the last legislative elections. The deputies who lost in June often came from more left-wing constituencies, such as Sonia Krimi or Brigitte Bourguignon.
“Put a rudder to the left”
New parliamentarians have often won in territories more properly labeled LR, starting with the group’s two spokespersons, Maud Bregeon and Prisca Thévenot, elected in the Hauts-de-Seine.
“If we want to put a rudder on the left and we really need it, we had to organize ourselves. There is an issue in rebalancing the discourse”, advances one of the “socially yours” deputies.
In an attempt to influence the text, these elected officials have submitted several amendments that seek to identify “deficiencies, holes in the racket,” according to one of them.
Amendments that “open the floodgates”
On the menu: relatively consensual modifications such as the possibility of extending the conditions for the repurchase of terms, internships or studies or even the possibility of reducing the minimum period by 6 months before resuming an activity with a former employer.
But others could quiver in the ranks of the majority like the possibility of giving “extra terms” to women who have children. One of its modifications continues to aim to return to the case of people who started working between the ages of 16 and 20 and that for some of them they will have to contribute for 44 years and not 43 years like the rest of the employees.
“Improvements, yes, but let’s take care of all the compensatory measures that could reduce the economic effects of the reform”, replies the deputy Robin Reda who defends tooth and nail the current version of the reform.
In the ranks of the macronie, it was also little appreciated that the dissensions within the majority spread in broad daylight, as the words of Barbara Pompili, former macronista minister.
“We cannot make a reform against the population”, the deputy of the Somme had thus advanced on BFMTV on January 25, explaining that she could not vote for the reform “at this stage”.
Not in “the slingshot”
About fifteen renaissance deputies refuse for the moment to vote in favor of the pension reform. Which gives it an air of a slingshot like in the days of François Hollande. Between 2012 and 2017, no less than forty socialist deputies, nicknamed the slingers, had regularly opposed the policy followed by the President of the Republic.
Elisabeth Borne also sought to close the ban on criticism during the meeting of the group of Renaissance deputies, ensuring that she did not “doubt for a second that the majority is united” on the lowering of the retirement age.
“We are neither in the sling nor in the fight. We are simply bearers of struggles and of people who are not sufficiently represented,” says deputy Ludovic Mendes.
“Deputies not Playmobil”
It must be said that the circumstances are also very different between Hollande’s five-year term and Emmanuel Macron’s second term. None of the members of this circuit seek to overthrow the government as was the case with some of the socialist rebels.
“We are not Playmobil deputies. We simply do our job by asking ourselves questions”, also justifies one of the deputies who are part of this WhatsApp loop.
Since the beginning of the legislature, only two Macronista deputies have expressed a vote “against” or an abstention.
Source: BFM TV
