An upper house to convince: the inclusion of abortion in the Constitution enters its most perilous parliamentary phase on Wednesday with its examination in committee in the Senate, where the right seems to be gradually opening up to reform despite still being reluctant tenacious. Will they vote in favor of constitutionalizing a “guaranteed freedom” for voluntary termination of pregnancy, as the executive hopes? Will they reject this flagship promise from Emmanuel Macron?
Or will they choose a third path, that of a new formulation of the constitutional bill, which would then force deputies to look at the subject again? The only certainty is that the suspense will be maintained until the examination of this constitutional revision in a public session on February 28. And there is no guarantee that the Senate, dominated by a demanding alliance of the right and the center, will approve the reform to the nearest decimal point.
A postponed Congress?
Only a compliant adoption by the Senate will pave the way for a Congress bringing together all parliamentarians. It will then be necessary to secure a three-fifths majority to definitively validate this constitutional reform. The date of March 5 for the Congress, envisaged at the end of 2023 by the executive, therefore appears very uncertain at this stage and the government is careful not to put it back on the table. “I am in no hurry,” Justice Minister Éric Dupond-Moretti confirmed on Tuesday, as if to cajole the senators. “Parliament must do its job and we will take the time it takes.”
The Minister of Justice, who knows he is supported by the entire left and the majority, still took care to challenge the right: “Has the time not come to consecrate this freedom all together? That would look great.” But the influential President of the Senate Gérard Larcher has caused trouble in recent days by loudly recalling his opposition to the government project. IVG is “not threatened” in France and the Constitution is “not a catalog of social and societal rights”, he said, attracting the wrath of associations defending women’s rights.
If many on the right share his analysis, the position of the patriarch of the upper house does not seem to be in the majority among the 348 senators in the chamber, nor among the 49 members of the Law Commission. Indeed, the Senate has already approved, in February 2023, a text enshrining in the Constitution the “freedom” of women to “end their pregnancy”. But the notion of “guarantee” did not appear there.
“Contempt for the debate”
“This will eventually pass,” himself recognizes Hervé Marseille, the leader of the centrists. As usual, he will leave “total freedom” to his troops on this project, although he is personally opposed to it. Same freedom at LR, where the leader Bruno Retailleau – also hostile – will impose “no political line” on its members “on this subject which involves the personal conscience of each”, he explained to the ‘AFP. Before insisting: “The government cannot impose a timetable on us in disregard of parliamentary debate.”
A sign of the difficulties of the right in adopting a collective position on this issue, several sources within the LR group have confirmed that no amendment will be tabled at the commission stage, the right preferring to reserve its possible proposals for February 28. “We can clearly see that there is an evolution in the group,” recognizes Agnès Canayer, appointed rapporteur by the LR group. “I am still not in favor of it but I will not vote against it,” she even slips, nevertheless pleading for the version already adopted in the Senate, a “clear, clear and limpid” formulation.
On the other side of the hemicycle, the left does not intend to ease the pressure to change the undecided: “The stakes of this vote go far beyond the current political context and our differences”, insists the ecologist Mélanie Vogel in a appeal to his colleagues from the right and the center.