A date is marked with a white stone in the agenda of the executive: this Friday, the Constitutional Council delivers its opinion on the pension reform. However, it is wrong to focus on this date. Editorial by Neila Latrous.
Compliant or not? This date of Friday April 14, with the Constitutional Council decisions on pension reform is certainly decisive for the destiny of Elisabeth Borne and her government. But it’s not that much at the moment we live in.
>> Pension reform: Elisabeth Borne “still thinks of being useful” in the crisis that the country is going through
A court decision, even of constitutional justice, is not enough to resolve a political crisis. Moreover, it is not a gift given to the Elders to entrust them with this role: they must decide according to law. To politicize their opinion, as both the executive and the opposition do, is to take the risk of accentuating the mistrust that has developed between the French and their institutions. The executive is playing a dangerous game when it explains that the Constitutional Council is the justice of the peace in social conflict. The oppositions, too, who, in their speeches, instil the idea that this text must necessarily be censored. This is to suggest that a decision contrary to the interests of each other.
Look away
And yet, a page will have to be turned after the opinion of the Constitutional Council. The crisis is not born with the pension reform. On the contrary, the weeks that we have just experienced are the extension of a long sequence that began well before Emmanuel Macron, with in particular the collapse of participation in the electoral deadlines, with more than 57% abstention in the second round of the last legislative elections. In other words: more than one in two French people who do not vote, it should have been a political earthquake. However, the parties spent the weeks following the election explaining who was really the winner of the polls, when, through their boycott, the French preferred to award them all a dunce cap.
There is also a collapse of trust in institutions. Barometer after barometer, the same observation: public speaking is demonetized. Emmanuel Macron, who had made the correct diagnosis of this democratic dropout in 2017, has not been able to provide an answer since the law on the moralization of public life, initiated during his first term, is insufficient. Promises to re-oxygenate democracy have since remained a dead letter. What happened to his promise of proportional? This transpartisan commission that he promised last May to make the political forces work together on an institutional recovery? What about the notebooks of grievances blackened during the “Great Debate”?
The “at the same time” lived
Emmanuel Macron will have to, in any case, to reconcile the two Frances. But how ? Very clever, who can say today that he has the miracle solution. But salvation begins with lucidity… The presidential election did not settle the disagreements. It took place under this leaden screed, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, with a evaded debate, the flag effect which did not make it possible to clarify the political offer. However, lucidity also means looking at who are the French people who went to the polls: there are two Frances, the one who earns a bad living, who can no longer save money, who has massively abstained and the one who is doing well who overwhelmingly voted Emmanuel Macron.
It is France which is doing badly that we will have to take care of: it certainly does not vote, but it is more numerous than that which is well. It means a clear choice: to choose some, and basically to abandon the “at the same time”.