Pension reform: Borne will take possession of the Constitutional Council for a study of the text

Elisabeth Borne will go “directly to the Constitutional Council” for an examination “as soon as possible” of the text of the pension reform, Matignon indicated Monday night after the approval of the bill.

The Prime Minister thus hopes that “all the points raised during the debates can be examined,” added the same source, referring to the challenge by certain parliamentarians of the constitutionality of various measures.

The left has indicated in particular that it wants to seize the Constitutional Council, questioning in particular the fact that this reform can be carried out through a project to modify the Social Security budget. *

Shared Initiative Referendum Request

The request for a shared initiative referendum, initiated by the left to challenge the pension reform, was also presented on Monday to the Constitutional Council, said the institution that will first examine its admissibility.

It has been presented by some 250 parliamentarians, deputies and senators, mostly from the left, while the reform has just been approved in Parliament.

The Council must verify its admissibility, in particular by examining whether the consultation refers to the areas of “the organization of public powers, reforms relating to economic, social or environmental policy and the public services that contribute to it”.

Then the collection of citizen signatures could be opened, in an attempt to reach a tenth of the voters, or 4.87 million signatures, within a period of nine months, to open the way to a referendum.

A complex procedure

In their text, the left-wing parliamentarians judge that the “option to extend the working day accentuates social inequalities and is particularly detrimental to the most vulnerable populations.”

They propose submitting to a referendum the fact that retirement “cannot be set beyond sixty-two years.”

A complex procedure, the Shared Initiative Referendum (RIP) has never been successful since its introduction into the Constitution in 2008, at the initiative of Nicolas Sarkozy.

A RIP petition had been launched in 2019-2020 to challenge the privatization of Aéroports de Paris, but stopped at just over a million signatures, below the necessary threshold.

However, the government had put its privatization project on hold due to the coronavirus crisis that had hit the air transport sector hard.