“Parliament no longer works as it should”. Hugues Renson, LREM vice-president of the National Assembly, announced on Wednesday February 16 his intention not to stand for re-election in the next legislative elections.
Member of Parliament for Paris and co-founder of En commun, a movement embodying the left wing of the majority, Hugues Renson affirms that his decision is “a carefully considered political act”. “It is both the fruit of a doubt about the political recomposition and the progressive project as I had envisaged them, of a concern about the evolution of our parliamentary democracy, and an alert, too, about the excesses of our politico-media system”he wrote on his website.
Hugues Renson, who readily claims the humanist commitment of former right-wing president Jacques Chirac, in his capacity as vice-president of the Palais Bourbon, led many debates during the legislature but found serious limits. “Wanted by its founders to be balanced, half-presidential, half-parliamentary, our Republic has drawn the consequences neither from the establishment of the five-year term, nor from the inversion of the electoral calendar which makes the legislative elections the replica of the presidential election, nor of a personal and centralized practice of power at work since the 2000s”he describes.
The National Assembly came to be seen – and sometimes to see itself – as a recording chamber for decisions made elsewhere.
Hugues Rensonon its website
“In the debates, divergent voices and temperance have little place, between the ease of systematic opposition and the sclerosis of majority discipline”he laments.
At the end of the legislature, I will not seek a new mandate.
This is a carefully considered personal and political decision, the reasons for which I explain today.https://t.co/agslbT5Doc
— Hugues Renson (@huguesrenson) February 16, 2022
“The country needs a debate on the options that are opening up. It needs different, competing and identified political lines and projects. Overcoming is not obliteration. And divisions are not a risk. On the contrary, they are a sign of the vitality of our democracy”he further observed as several right-wing politicians joined the majority camp.