Pensions: the moment of truth is approaching, crisis meeting at the Élysée

Emmanuel Macron invited the leaders of his majority on Thursday morning for a breakfast at the Élysée, which takes on the appearance of a crisis meeting at the start of a decisive day for his pension reform, with a suspense still full on the outcome of a vote scheduled for the afternoon in the National Assembly.

With the Head of State, Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne, several ministers and the leaders of the presidential camp in the National Assembly must decide a dilemma: go to a very tight and risky vote or engage article 49.3 often compared to a forced passage.

Late Wednesday evening, after further ministerial consultations, Emmanuel Macron said he wanted a vote on this reform. But “nothing is decided”, had indicated a source within the executive.

After weeks of fierce debates and negotiations under high tension, Emmanuel Macron’s extremely unpopular pension reform should in principle have its parliamentary epilogue on Thursday.

A compromise sealed Wednesday between seven deputies and seven senators, after more than eight hours of debate behind the closed doors of a joint joint committee (CMP), paved the way for a vote in the two assemblies for this project moving back to 64 years retirement age.

The text tied up in a small committee will be examined from 9 a.m. in the Senate, dominated by the right, where the favorable outcome of the vote is hardly in doubt.

But it is above all towards the Palais Bourbon that all the spotlights will be pointed from 3 p.m., as the outcome of the ballot is still uncertain there. The government is dependent on the right-wing deputies of the Les Républicains party, who are divided and much more skeptical of the reform than their fellow senators.

If the government had recourse to article 49.3 of the Constitution, the text would pass without a vote unless a motion of censure is adopted.

LR deputies divided

The President of the Republic “wants to ensure that the conditions are met” to go to a vote, indicated Wednesday evening the Elysée, while the counts of each other always arrive at the same conclusion: the outcome will play within a few voices.

If such a vote was lost, Emmanuel Macron considered with his interlocutors the possibility of a dissolution of the Assembly, according to majority executives.

The President of the Republic plays very big on this parliamentary sequence. The rest of his second five-year term and his ability to reform France depend on it.

The presidential camp does not have an absolute majority in the Assembly. And the concessions granted to the LR deputies, in particular on their hobbyhorse of the long career device, did not dispel doubts about the voting intentions of the deputies of this undisciplined group.

“In my group, as in the majority moreover, there are deputies who will not wish to vote for this reform”, admitted Wednesday their leader Olivier Marleix after having welcomed the “advances” which he considers to have obtained in CPM.

Several of them did not hide their moods.

The deputy of the Territoire de Belfort Ian Boucard, who thus estimates “between 15 and 20” the number of opponents to the text among his LR colleagues, explained after a meeting of his group on Wednesday evening that he “continues to vote against” because he is “against postponing the retirement age”.

“It is better to have a 49.3 than no reform at all”, estimated for his part the boss of the LR senators, Bruno Retailleau, very favorable to the text, as if to play down the use of this procedure, the use of which on Thursday would be the hundredth since the beginning of the Fifth Republic.

“Nothing is over”

The opposition would not fail to qualify the absence of a vote as an anti-democratic act which, according to the union leaders, would be likely to harden the social movement.

“Nothing is over”, warned the leader of the Insoumis deputies Mathilde Panot, announcing that her group would vote Thursday in favor of the motion to reject the reform tabled by the small group of independent deputies Liot in the Assembly.

“And then we will continue with all the tools at our disposal: referral to the Constitutional Council, motion of censure and the rest we will tell you afterwards,” she said.

On the social front, after the demonstrations on Wednesday (which brought together 1.7 million people according to the CGT and 480,000 according to the Ministry of the Interior), the inter-union called “solemnly” on parliamentarians to vote against reform.

This reform “is disconnected from the concrete reality of work”, insisted the general secretary of the CFDT Laurent Berger.

But the movement is showing some signs of running out of steam. The demonstrators are less numerous in the streets and in crucial sectors like transport, the strikes do not last or are little followed.

In a meeting at Chevilly-Larue on Wednesday evening, the leader of the left Jean-Luc Mélenchon sought to prevent in advance any resignation among his troops.

“We are the force because we are the many. (…) Do not let yourself be robbed”, he encouraged them.

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