Two motions of censure were tabled Friday against the French government which is plunged into a political crisis the day after its passage in force on the pension reform, which amplified social anger and triggered unrest in several regions of the country.
The deputies of the centrist independent parliamentary group Liot announced to the National Assembly the tabling of a “transpartisan” motion of censure of the government, co-signed by elected representatives of the NUPES (radical left).
The National Rally (far right) also tabled a motion of censure on Friday, castigating an “unfair and unnecessary reform”.
These steps are responses to President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to resort to the weapon of Article 49.3 of the Constitution on Thursday – allowing the adoption of a text without a vote in the Assembly, unless a motion of censure comes. to overthrow the government – on this very unpopular pension reform, against which many French people have mobilized since January 19.
The decision to trigger 49.3 “is the apogee of a denial of democracy that is unacceptable in its consistency and its contempt for our institutions and our social bodies”, is it notably written in the text of Liot’s motion.
The government of Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne is on hot coals in the face of the filing of these motions of censure.
That of Liot is the one that could potentially cause the most problems for the government because of its transpartisan side.
” His fault “
To bring down the government, a motion of censure will have to collect an absolute majority in the Assembly, ie 287 votes. This would require in particular that around thirty right-wing deputies Les Républicains (out of 61) bring theirs during the vote on the motion of the Liot group, in addition to filling up with other opponents, a hypothesis which seems unlikely.
The French government has chosen to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64 in response to the financial deterioration of pension funds and the aging of the population. France is one of the European countries where the legal retirement age is the lowest, without the pension systems being completely comparable.
This measure of the decline in the legal retirement age crystallizes the anger, against the backdrop of renewable strikes.
The various opinion polls show that the French are mostly hostile to it, even if the number of demonstrators in the streets and of strikers has stagnated or declined over time.
The use of 49.3, which upset some parliamentarians but also French people who spontaneously took to the streets on Thursday evening, is almost unanimously considered a setback for Emmanuel Macron, who has bet a lot of his political credit on this key reform of his second five-year term.
“Pension crisis: his fault”, headlined the newspaper Release (left) with a portrait of Emmanuel Macron in the background.
For Bernard Sananès, of the Elabe Institute, “it is too early to speak of the failure of the five-year term”. “But it is certain that the government has accumulated failures and underestimated the difficulty in a country where the climate is very tense; there is a break with public opinion,” he told AFP.
“Fear” that it overflows
The intersyndicale called for “local union meetings this weekend” and a ninth “big day of strikes and demonstrations on Thursday March 23”. In a separate press release, the powerful CGT union invited to “amplify the mobilizations and the strikes”.
Union officials do not hide their fear of seeing the social movement overflow the centrals.
“Yes, we are afraid” that it will overflow, told AFP the president of the CFTC, Cyril Chabanier. “We had written in our inter-union letter that after a while not being listened to, and going to 49.3, it would be an amplified anger and that there were risks of social explosion”, a he recalled.
In Paris as in the provinces, more or less spontaneous demonstrations were punctuated Thursday evening with overflows, with vandalized street furniture, burnt garbage cans, broken windows, and, in Dijon, effigies of President Macron and several ministers burned under the eyes of trade unionists.
A thorny consequence of the renewable strikes among garbage collectors – who are protesting against a two-year postponement of their retirement from their arduous profession – the health situation in Paris, the world capital of tourism, was worsening: the bar of 10,000 tonnes of uncollected waste was reached Friday at midday, according to the estimate of the town hall, at 12e day of strike by its garbage collectors.
Blocking of the Paris ring road, the Toulon or Bordeaux station, demonstrations…: after rallies of several thousand “rebellious” demonstrators on Thursday, opponents of the reform resumed the fight sporadically on Friday, most often at the initiative of the CGT.
In the meantime, the ministers are standing up. “We have a vocation to continue to govern,” said government spokesman Olivier Véran.