After an extraordinary session in July, parliamentarians will, from next week, be able to go on vacation. The resumption of debates in the hemicycles of the Assembly and the Senate is scheduled for October 3. There will therefore be no extraordinary session in September. “It’s quite rare,“commented the Renaissance deputy for Val-de-Marne Frédéric Descrozaille on Monday August 1 on RFI. There was officially only one parliamentary session, but he comments, it “is most often supplemented by two extraordinary sessions in September and July“
Indeed, if we look at the minutes of parliamentary sessions over the past twenty years, in the National Assembly and the Senate, as well as the decrees convening Parliament, published in the Official Journal, we see that there have been systematically, since 2006, extraordinary parliamentary sessions in September. But this is not supposed to be systematic. What the French Constitution has provided for (in its article 28) since 1995 is a single session, supposed to start on the first working day of October and end on the last working day of June, with a maximum of 120 sitting days per Assembly.
Apart from this ordinary nine-month calendar, Articles 28 and 29 of the Constitution leave the possibility of extraordinary sessions of Parliament, “at the request of the Prime Minister or of the majority of the members composing the National Assembly, on a specific agenda“. But thIn practice, extraordinary sessions in July, September or both have tended to become systematic since the early 2000s.
So that won’t be the case this time around, but that doesn’t mean MEPs will be on vacation until October. Beyond the work on the ground in their constituencies, the wish of the new President of the National Assembly Yaël Braun Pivet is that parliamentarians have more time than before to read the texts and prepare the debates, conduct hearings to have all the issues in mind, to discuss, to negotiate even before the debates in the hemicycles in order to try to find points of convergence before the debates in the hemicycles. Making sure that there is no session as of September aims to allow all this work upstream.
Among other things, this would require parliamentarians to have government bills sufficiently in advance and that these texts be shorter and clearer than they have tended to be in recent times.