CONSTITUTIONAL COUNCIL. The Constitutional Council must decide this Wednesday, May 3 on the second request for a referendum of shared initiative on the subject of the pension reform. He could reject her again.
[Updated May 3, 2023 at 11 a.m.] Validated or rejected? The second request for a shared initiative referendum (RIP) on the pension reform seems unlikely to succeed. The Constitutional Council must render its decision on the project submitted by the Socialist deputies this Wednesday, May 3 at the end of the day. The objective is simple: to maintain the retirement age at 62 and not at 64 as provided for in the pension reform. The Elders have already defeated the first attempt at RIP on April 14, judging that the request of the elected representatives of the left did not come under a “change in the state of the law”, that is to say a reform. As the law was not enacted until the evening of April 14, at the time of the consideration of the first RIP the retirement age was still set at 62 and the request was intended to maintain the status quo, not to change the law. . However, this is what the RIP should be used for.
With the pension reform now approved, can the second RIP hope to be validated? In addition to the request concerning the extension of the retirement age which remained almost identical between the two texts, the elected authors of the RIP added a second, more financial article relating to the allocation of CSG income to the branch “old age” of Social Security. An addition that constitutes “an element of reform” according to the analysis of Socialist Senator Patrick Kanner with AFP.
The second request for a shared initiative referendum could fail for the same reasons as the first, according to Thibaud Mulier, lecturer in public law at the University of Nanterre interviewed by franceinfo. “The first bill did not constitute a reform within the meaning of Article 11 of the Constitution (article which lays down the conditions for the validity of a RIP, editor’s note). If we follow the logic of the Constitutional Council, and since the new wording of the first article is almost identical, we will fall back on the same problem”, estimated the specialist. However, the temporality differs: this time, the pension reform law was indeed enacted during the review of the RIP. But for this reason, another difficulty could be encountered, because the RIP must not “have as its object the repeal of a legislative provision enacted for less than one year”.
As for article 2, its addition would not be sufficient to guarantee the validation of the RIP by the Elders? Not really. Unlike ordinary bills, split-initiative referendums must be found to be constitutional as a whole and cannot be partially censored. “Since the first article of the proposal is unconstitutional, the whole of the proposal is”, advances Thibaud Mulier anticipating the possible explanation of the Constitutional Council.
If the Constitutional Council decides to validate the request for a shared initiative referendum, then a long process would take place. The text of elected officials from the left and the center advocating maintaining the retirement age at 62 should be signed by at least 4.88 million people (i.e. 10% of French voters) within nine months . This second step validated, the text would be returned to Parliament to be examined and voted on by the National Assembly and the Senate within six months. After this period if no vote has taken place, the President of the Republic would be obliged to organize a referendum on the text. Many stages which do not guarantee the success of the RIP even in the event of validation of the text by the Constitutional Council.
“On the date of the registration of the referral, the bill aimed at affirming that the legal retirement age cannot be set beyond 62 does not entail a change in the state of the right” justified the Constitutional Council, on April 14, after having rejected the text. And to add that “when the Constitutional Council is seized of an amending social security financing law, it is only up to it to check that it includes the provisions falling within the “compulsory field”, and to check that the other provisions are not ‘social riders’.”
The institution chaired by the former socialist Prime Minister Laurent Fabius did not follow the parliamentarians of the left or of the National Rally, who had pleaded a misuse of parliamentary procedure to have the law adopted. She nevertheless referred to the “unusual nature” of the accumulation of procedures aimed at restricting debates in the National Assembly and the Senate.
The Constitutional Council delivered its decisions on the constitutionality of the pension reform on Friday, April 14. He partially censored the text, challenging six “social riders”, including the one on the senior index, which was to be mandatory this year for companies with more than 1,000 employees, and whose non-publication was to be punishable . The article on the CDI senior was also censored, which was to facilitate the hiring of long-term job seekers over 60 years old. Nevertheless, the least popular measure of this pension reform, article 7, on the decline in the retirement age from 62 to 64, has been validated by the Elders.
Following the decision of the Constitutional Council, Elisabeth Borne considered that there had been “neither winner nor defeated”. And to add that the text arrived “at the end of its democratic process.” Yet opponents of the pension reform have made themselves heard, both on the political side and on the trade union side. “It’s not over,” said Sophie Binet, the new secretary of the CGT, on behalf of the intersyndicale, convinced that not enacting the law is the “only way to calm the anger (…) in the country”. The president “cannot govern the country until he withdraws this reform,” she added.
“The struggle continues,” said rebellious leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who portrayed a Constitutional Council “more attentive to the needs of the presidential monarchy than to those of the sovereign people”. For her part, Marine Le Pen considered that “the political fate of the pension reform is not sealed. In a press release published on social networks, the Socialist Party, for its part, indicated that it would table a proposal bill repealing the pension reform”.
