Room of the Four Columns or the Pas Perdus, in the press stands or in the corridors, 20 minutes spent the day Monday at the National Assembly for the first day of the examination in session of the pension reform. The day, it was expected, was particularly animated, but the government came out of it without incident: neither the motion of preliminary rejection, nor the referendum motion were adopted by the deputies. This is a first obstacle passed. Between small and big news, the story of this first day.
The mishmash of motions
The main interest of this first day of debates on the pension reform was the study of the preliminary and referendum rejection motions. The left has not digested that its referendum motion, tabled first and with the most signatories, must undergo a draw which favored the text tabled by the National Rally. In an attempt to circumvent this void in the rules of the Assembly (no two referendum motions had ever been tabled at the same time since 1958), the Nupes helped the small group Liot (Liberties, Independents, Overseas and Territories), which brings together various deputies left and various right, to file a third, in time.
The idea: to force a new draw but also to have a possibly more unifying text. An LR deputy, Ian Boucard, even signed it. The beginning of the session was a long litany of points of order asking for a meeting of the Conference of Presidents. It will not be, and Nupes and Liot cry out for the denial of democracy. Yaël Braun-Pivet, the President of the National Assembly, defends her position in the face of a screaming left: “I do not know, my dear colleagues, where is the denial of democracy when the President of the National Assembly cannot ‘express ! “, she is applauded by the majority but also applauded by the extreme right.
Dussopt stopped
The President of the National Assembly then calls, as it should, the government, and therefore the Minister of Labour, Olivier Dussopt, to go up to the podium for the start of the general discussion on the pension reform project. Not everything is going to go as planned, to put it mildly. The tension is the hemicycle is palpable, we no longer hear each other, the desks slap.
Several Nupes deputies, including the socialist, however moderate, Valérie Rabault, ask to speak for new reminders of the regulations. The president of the communist group, André Chassaigne, gets up to speak into a microphone that is not opened to him and for good reason, Yaël Braun-Pivet considers that everyone has been able to express themselves. She does not want to suspend the session, but will be forced to do so by the left, which literally prevents Olivier Dussopt from starting his speech.
After five minutes of suspension, finally each group which requested it will have the right to its additional point of order. Olivier Dussopt will be able to begin his speech, but in what atmosphere. It will be necessary to wait for very long minutes before the deputies, especially LFI, calm their ardor. “Are we going to spend 15 days like this? asks the president; “YESIII”, replies LFI. “We are not in an auditorium, we are not in a demonstration, we are in the hemicycle of the National Assembly”, gets angry then Yaël Braun-Pivet. Majority, LR but also RN stand up to applaud: the tone is set.
With the SNCF advantage, is it possible?
But all is not lost for Nupes. There is still a chance that the referendum motion of the RN is not the one debated: that a signatory is missing on the call in the hemicycle at the time of its examination. And, in this case, we move on to the next proposal.
“If your train arrives late, that’s bad luck…”, jokes a socialist at the start of the afternoon with journalists. He will not answer the question of whether the CGT is in on it. The joke nevertheless takes a more serious turn around 7 p.m. when the debate on the referendum motion comes on the agenda. Marine Le Pen denounced messages received by “four or five” of her deputies, indicating that their child was hospitalized, in order to get them out at the appropriate time. Impossible to verify but copies of these messages should be sent to the President of the Assembly.
The Attal show
Olivier Dussopt, always very technical, ended up gradually putting the left of the Assembly to sleep even if, here and there, “lies! or “sold!” were addressed to the Minister. At the podium he was succeeded by the Minister Delegate for Public Accounts, the much more flamboyant Gabriel Attal. He delivered a more political and removed speech from his government colleague, also a former socialist: “It’s reform or bankruptcy”, immediately it wakes up. “Here we are at the time when the electoral interest will have to be given priority over the general interest”, affirms the minister, who says he is going “against the popularity of the moment”. That’s for the LRs.
But it is of course against the left that his pikes will be the sharpest. “The Nupes proposes to finance pensions by 110 billion more taxes”, assures Gabriel Attal who is working to demonstrate with a striking anaphora that the first victims of this increase in contributions (and not taxes, as the minister) would be “the wage earners, not the billionaires”. “Before being an opposition party, you are a tax party, you only think of one thing, taxing the French”, launched Gabriel Attal in a form of thrust. More than ever, it is the minister who rises.
The return of Adrien Quatennens
He had already returned to committee, at the beginning of January, but never in the hemicycle: Adrien Quatennens chose his day well to return discreetly. After his four-month suspended sentence for domestic violence, the deputy of Lille was excluded from the rebellious group for four months. He therefore now sits as non-registered, on the edge of the LFI and Renaissance groups, at the top of the stands. Not registered, but not isolated, even to pretend: when he arrived, Adrien Quatennens was accompanied, and not just anyone. He was with Manuel Bompard, the coordinator of LFI. The MP for Marseille is one of those, with the leadership of the movement, who is campaigning most ardently for an unconditional return of the MP for the North in mid-April, after four months.