The Liot group, made up of elected officials from all political stripes, had defended the motion of censure to which it only lacked 9 votes to bring down the government after 49.3 on the pension reform. This association aims to pursue transpartisan projects.
Failing to bring down the government by nine votes after the use of 49.3 on the pension reform, conferred a certain notoriety on the parliamentary group Liot (Freedoms, Independents, Overseas and Territories). Made up of around twenty deputies from different political backgrounds, it carried the cross-partisan censure motion on March 20. “People wrote to us saying: ‘we want to join Liot, we want to run for elections for Liot’. We replied that we were only a parliamentary group and therefore the answer was our association. “, explains to franceinfo Bertrand Pancher, the president of the Liot group in the National Assembly.
“We really need to overhaul our democracy in depth. We think that faced with three blocs led by authoritarian personalities, there really is room”
Bertrand Pancher, president of the Liot group at the National Assemblyat franceinfo
Bertrand Pancher and his fellow deputies had had the project for several months to decline their transpartisan work in a movement. The near success of their no-confidence motion gave them the final impetus. They therefore launched on March 29 an association called “Utiles” , an acronym for Ultramarines, Independent Territories, Freedom, Ecology and Solidarity to better influence French political life.
This association must bring together people from the center, from the right, from the left. The main idea is to listen to local elected officials and citizens gathered in participatory committees and to bring up good ideas. “An initiative that aims to ensure that, collectively, we are able to reflect, to find solutions, not necessarily agreeing on everything”, defines the Lille ecologist Marie-Pierre Bresson, seduced by the approach. In short, taking politics backwards from what Emmanuel Macron is doing, abounds the deputy of Guadeloupe Olivier Serva: “This central power has forgotten that there is a base, there are intermediate bodies, there are unions, there are men and women who have ideas”.
“There are local elected officials who have a background, who have specificities and who cannot be overcome. We cannot say that even if the opinion is in the majority against the pension reform, we are doing it anyway .”
Olivier Serva, MP for Guadeloupeat franceinfo
Among the elected officials who embark on the adventure, there is also the mayor of Orléans, Serge Grouard, who has just left Les Républicains. “I think we are in a very degraded, very tense situation. We have to get out of it and for that, people of good will have to find themselves with different sensitivities, he explains. If there are mayors and local elected officials who listen to me, they might say: ‘But we do it every day!’ Why can’t what we do on a daily basis be done nationally?.
For the moment, the movement looks like a patchwork of elected officials who no longer recognize themselves in the other parties. The future will tell if they really manage to make themselves useful and to bring political proposals.