“Let’s fight”. Patrick Kanner, number 1 of the socialist senators, set the tone this Wednesday afternoon, 24 hours after the first steps of the pension reform took place in the Senate chamber.
To counter the reform, environmentalists, communists and socialists will present a referendum motion on Friday: the rebels have no group in the upper house.
An almost impossible referendum
They thus take the example of their fellow deputies, while the Nupes and Agrupación Nacional had also presented a referendum motion in the National Assembly during the debates.
The objective: to achieve the organization of a referendum on the issue of pensions and suspend the discussion of the current executive bill. However, this scenario has almost no chance of success.
To be adopted, this provision must first receive a majority vote in the Senate. Problem: the current composition of the chamber, where right-wing senators and centrists are in the majority, makes it unlikely that the motion will be voted in favor.
Especially since the LR senators have not stopped in recent years for each social security budget to vote in favor of retirement at 64.
Delay article 7 on retirement to 64
And even in case of adoption, the National Assembly should also say yes. But the maneuver already failed on this side of Parliament in mid-February. Finally, even if the deputies voted in favour, the last word on the organization or not of a referendum would correspond to the president, in accordance with article 11 of the Constitution.
An impossible hypothesis, as the tenors of the majority have repeated on several occasions. Suffice it to say that this tool has all the parliamentary tactics to make it clear to the government that the senatorial left does not intend to bow down.
At the center of the strategy drawn up collectively by the PS, environmental groups and communists: achieve -unlike the deputies- debate the very emblematic article 7, which raises the retirement age to 64 years, but not before March 7 . The unions, which called to “paralyze France” that day, expect a massive mobilization to move political lines.
Lack of vote in the Senate, bad news for the Executive
To achieve this objective, the union of the left intends to rely on the classics of parliamentary debate to save time, between procedural motions, speaking before each article and each amendment.
The senators also intend to request explanations of vote before each scrutiny with the aim of not reaching the end of the text on March 12, the date set by the Government to end the debates.
Which gives the executive cold sweats. If there is no vote, this would mean that this emblematic reform has not been legitimized by either the National Assembly or the Senate, greatly complicating the rest of the text.
Franck Riester has already put pressure on the left. “I hope that the senatorial left does not make a parliamentary hindrance, we are going to judge on paper,” the delegate minister for Relations with the Courts launched this Wednesday afternoon in the Public Senate.
Source: BFM TV
