This is yet another crucial day for opponents of pension reform. The Constitutional Council must decide this Wednesday on a second request for a referendum made by the left.
The decision will be made public at the end of the day. “We are very reasonably optimistic” on a green light, concede the Socialists, when the rebellious do not even believe in it anymore. For its part, the presidential majority is calm and has largely stepped over the deadline. “If I reason in law”, this request for a referendum of shared initiative (RIP) “does not pass”, thus loose a framework.
Borne tackles the “sound of pans”
The “democratic path” of reform is over, for her part reaffirmed Tuesday Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne, who set with Emmanuel Macron a new roadmap. “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.
This 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.
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 marked by violence. Actions are also expected this Wednesday on the occasion of the new decision of the Council. Thus in Bordeaux, the CGT called for a demonstration at 6 p.m. in front of the tribunal de grande instance to “express this determination to seize all the republican and democratic tools” in order to obtain the withdrawal of the reform.
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, patron of the socialist senators, have completed their proposal by planning to also request a “significant contribution of capital income” to the financing of pensions.
If by chance the RIP were validated, the obstacle course would continue, with the necessary collection of 4.8 million citizen supporters in nine months. Then it would be necessary that the referendum proposal be examined neither by the National Assembly nor by the Senate during the following six months, so that the president submits it to the people. This is why the left is betting more on June 8, the day the National Assembly examines a bill from the Liot group aimed at repealing the reform.