French President Emmanuel Macron and his government have decided to approve the disputed pension reform without going through the vote of the National Assembly, the more important of the two branches of the French parliament: the majority that supported the provision was extremely narrow, and the reform risked not passing.
Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne, at the end of the fourth meeting in less than 24 hours with her ministers and President Macron, announced her intention to resort to paragraph 3 of article 49 of the French Constitution, which allows a prime minister or a minister to approve a text of law on finance or welfare financing without going through a parliamentary vote (with the approval of the Council of Ministers).
The main point of the reform and against which there is most protest is the raising of the minimum age for retirement from 62 to 64 years. It has provoked a series of demonstrations and strikes from January until today, which have intensified in the last week. However, the government has shown itself to be very resolute in wanting to approve it anyway. On Thursday, after strong protests in the hall, which also led to the suspension of work for a few minutes, Borne communicated to the Assembly the government’s decision to resort to paragraph 3 (also known as 49.3), justifying it with the desire not to risk “the compromise found after 175 hours of parliamentary debate is sunk by a few votes”.
Now the reform is to be considered approved “in first reading”, but the deputies have 24 hours to present a motion of no confidence in the government. If the no-confidence motion wins a majority, the law will be rejected and the government will fall. If, on the other hand, no motion is presented (an unlikely option in this case, the oppositions have already announced them) or if it does not have a majority, the law will continue its process: before being definitively approved, it must go back to the Senate, where the majority is more solid and then return to the National Assembly, where the government will still be able to use paragraph 3 of article 49. The subsequent steps are normally formalities: the real obstacle on which the government and President Macron risk would be the vote of confidence.
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Recourse to paragraph 3 of article 49 was one of the possible options available to the government to pass the reform, but it was considered politically the most extreme. In fact, the choice, in addition to potentially putting the government at risk, risks further animating the street protests, which for some months have blocked some production sectors, transport, schools and waste collection. Already in the minutes following the announcement, some demonstrators tried to make their way towards the National Assembly.
Protest at the National Assembly (AP Photo/Thomas Padilla)
On Thursday morning the law had passed without problems in the Senate, where the majority that supports it is more solid, but in the National Assembly it would have needed the support of the vote of the Republicans, the main center-right party, which in recent days has not they were pronounced and that they could have split. Until a few minutes before the breakthrough decided by President Macron, French analysts believed that the law could have passed or been rejected by 4-5 votes. A risk that the French president did not want to take, having invested heavily in this reform project which was already in the electoral program of his first term as president: at the time he had not been able to complete it, also due to the pandemic.
The use of 49.3 is not so unusual in French republican history: since 1958 it has been used 89 times, but rarely in the last two decades, when the parliamentary majorities had been more solid, and almost never for such an important reform, or at the center of such a lively public debate.
