The Constitutional Council on Wednesday rejected a second request for a referendum on pensions that the left had filed in extremis, before the promulgation of the highly contested government reform.
Unsurprisingly, the Elders judged that the proposal for a referendum of shared initiative (RIP) carried by some 250 deputies and senators did not meet the required criteria. The left is betting on a next step in the National Assembly on June 8, the day of examination of a bill from the independent group Liot to repeal the reform bringing the legal age of departure to 64 years.
No question of “turning the page”
His “democratic path” is over, Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne said on Tuesday, who has set a new roadmap with Emmanuel Macron and wants to continue to “act”. “Social progress will not come from the noise of the pans”, she scolded, in response to the ecologist Cyrielle Chatelain, in the always boiling hemicycle of the Palais-Bourbon.
But no question of “turning the page”, repeated the left alliance. The second RIP was initiated in extremis on April 13 by some 250 left-wing and independent deputies and senators. The next day, the Constitutional Council, under the leadership of Laurent Fabius, had validated most of the pension reform, including the postponement of the legal age to 64, and rejected a first request for RIP.
A “fighting” 1st of May
The law had been promulgated in stride by Emmanuel Macron, but the battle continued. Still united after 12 days of mobilizations, the inter-union organized a “combative” May 1st which brought together 800,000 people according to the police (2.3 million according to the CGT), but was marred by violence. In the detail of the RIP version 2, the parliamentarians want by a popular consultation “to prohibit a legal retirement age higher than 62 years” – that is what they had already proposed in the first request challenged by the guardians of the Constitution .
To increase their chances of success, these elected officials led by Patrick Kanner, boss of the Socialist senators, have completed their proposal by planning to also request by referendum a “significant contribution of capital income” to the financing of pensions. The whole point is that the Constitutional Council considers this evolution of taxation as a real “reform”, we note on the left.