The pension reform arrives this week in the Senate for the first debates in session. This time, the majority is made up of the right and the center. This majority is in favor of postponing the legal age to 64, it intends to vote for the reform, but after having taken care to modify it.
The future of the majority is being played out this week in the Senate. And the majority on the right, at the Luxembourg Palace, intends to take advantage of it. Ten days after the end of the discussions in the National Assembly interspersed with warm-ups and invectives in the hemicycle, the time has come for appeasement. Two days before the examination of the pension reform by the Senate, the government multiplies the gestures of “opening” and calls to “enrichment“of the text, in particular on the situation of women, one of the main demands of LR, a majority in the upper house.
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Bruno Retailleau, the boss of right-wing senators, thus put forward his demands this Saturday in the Parisian/ Today in France. They may also appear in the text from the debates in committee on Tuesday. One, the main one, therefore concerns the retirement of mothers. The right wants to leave them the choice between an early departure at age 63 or a 5% premium once the legal age is reached and in full career. The LRs also intend to protect seniors with an end-of-career CDI, exempt from family contributions. Finally, these senators want to accelerate the abolition of special regimes from 2025, but this wish of Bruno Retailleau is not supported by the centrists, allies of the LRs in the senatorial majority.
Olivier Dussopt, the Minister of Labour, says he is open to debate. “We must see”, according to him, “how the layout is proposed and how it is articulated”. It is too early to say whether the government will follow the LRs, assures the entourage of the Prime Minister. It must be said that the subject worries within the executive. A leading minister slips that it would be fashionable to avoid upsetting the RATP and the SNCF before the call for a general strike on March 7.
A different tone from the National Assembly
Still, Emmanuel Macron himself makes it clear: “I hope that the Senate can enrich” the text “with what seems useful“, he thus explained on Saturday evening, in the spans of the Salon de l’agriculture.
Enrich, yes, but not reproduce the stormy debates of the Assembly: in the Senate, “we are not at the show”, warns a socialist of weight, indignant by the sequence of the Palais Bourbon, which “did not serve parliamentarism, and which made executive power appear as stability”he denounces to franceinfo. “With us, there are no rebels”, also like to point out several senators. The Left in the Senate “Won’t insult everyone, make caterpillars and spin the towels”, quips a centrist.
No question for the opponents of the text to file as many amendments as at the Palais Bourbon only a few thousand. But the strategy is “hit on the bottom”. “We are going to slow down the debates by taking the time”, says an environmentalist. All want to go as far as Article 7, without however voting for the entire text as the majority wishes.