For Elisabeth Borne, the hardest part begins: governing without resorting to 49.3. It should be remembered that in addition to the Social Security budget and the finance bill, on which she can use this article at each reading – as she decided again on Wednesday 2 October for the entire budget – the Prime Minister may draw this article for only one bill per session. The executive therefore only has one cartridge left and he prefers to keep it for the large piece of legislation planned for the first half of 2023, the pension reform. As a result, other projects may be delayed. Starting with this energy file, which is nevertheless considered a priority in view of the fight against climate change and the consequences of the war in Ukraine.
>> Renewable energies: will the government succeed in finding a second wind to pass its bill?
And it is to try to find one, and even two majorities, that the government is presenting two separate texts on France’s energy policy: one which concerns the development of renewable energies, currently under discussion in the Senate, the other on the revival of nuclear power, presented Wednesday in the Council of Ministers.
Immobilism threatens
On the first, the government is flirting with support on the left. But, for the time being, there is no question for the socialists or the ecologists to come to the aid of a text which they consider to be too unambitious. And of course, even more so since right-wing senators unraveled it by granting veto power to mayors to oppose renewable energy projects and banning the development of wind power within 40 kilometers of the coast. To pass the other text, the one which endorses the revival of nuclear power, and in particular the launch of six new generation EPRs, the executive is counting on the benevolence of the right. But here too, the elected LRs do not intend to give the Head of State a gift and they prefer to castigate his about-face on nuclear power.
Result: immobility threatens, including on a subject as strategic as energy. And whether we attribute it to the cynicism of the Macronist majority – which is looking for allies a move to the right, a move elsewhere – or to the sectarianism of the oppositions, we see that we are still far, very far, from a change of culture democracy and the search for German-style compromise, dreamed of by some the day after the legislative elections.