Tell us about QAG, current issues in government

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They take place every week in Parliament, but from Wednesday, they will only be addressed to the Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal.

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Gabriel Attal, Prime Minister, speaks during a session of current questions to the government at the National Assembly, in Paris, April 2, 2024. (XOSE BOUZAS / HANS LUCAS)

Current Issues in Government, or QAG, have existed for 50 years since Valéry Giscard d’Estaing came to power. The former President of the Republic wanted the control and information of parliamentarians to be better ensured. In general, the questions relate to political, economic, social or media news of a national scope. As his Prime Minister, Jacques Chirac, said in 1974, “this type of debate should not be limited to constituency matters”.

How QAGs work

Concretely, today there are three QAG sessions each week: two in the Assembly, on Tuesday afternoon for 1h30 and on Wednesday for three quarters of an hour, and one in the Senate, also on Wednesday, which lasts more than an hour. It’s the same procedure for all three sessions.

Beforehand, each political group meets to choose their speaker and determine their question, knowing that they are not obliged to disclose it before the QAGs. If we take the example of the Tuesday session in the Assembly, each of the 10 groups can express themselves, but not all are entitled to the same number of questions, it depends on the number of deputies they have.

Each speaker has two minutes of microphone time to ask their question and possibly react to the answer of the minister questioned. VSThe latter has the same speaking time, with the exception of the Prime Minister who, according to custom, is not timed.

The stakes during these QAG

Beyond the expected response, it is a moment of media visibility that the groups and their deputies use. These questions and answers are taken up by radio and television news and are also shared on social networks.

The QAGs sometimes reserve memorable political sequences, like December 5, 2012, when Jérôme Cahuzac, Budget Minister of François Hollande, targeted by a Medipart investigation, answers a question from the opposition: “I don’t have a foreign account, MP, I’ve never had an account abroad, neither now nor before.” VShe lied that day, we learned it four months later. The QAGs accelerated its fall.


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