195 votes for, 112 against. This Saturday evening, the Senate adopted the text on the pension reform, which provides in particular for a decline in the retirement age to 64 years. From now on, the text must pass this Wednesday before a joint joint committee, before returning to the Senate, then returning to the National Assembly.
“Democracy is Parliament and it is not up to the streets, nor to the unions to dictate”
Bruno Retailleau, the president of the group Les Républicains au Sénat, was the guest of the Grand Rendez-vous this Sunday. If he welcomed the adoption of the text by the senators, while criticizing the “attempts at obstruction from the left”, the leader of the LRs in the Senate returned to the possibility of a forced passage of the text Thursday in the Assembly, through the use of 49.3. While in the Sunday newspaperthe leader of the CFDT Laurent Berger affirmed that the use of 49.3 to pass the pension reform would be “dangerous”, for Bruno Retailleau, “the 49.3 is a brutal procedure, but democracy is the application of the Constitution is not the power of the street.”
“Democracy is Parliament and it is not up to the streets, nor to the unions to dictate”, he added, the day after a seventh day of mobilization against the pension reform, which gathered more than a million people throughout France, according to the CGT, 368,000 according to the Ministry of the Interior. If this last day of demonstration was less followed than the previous ones, the anger against the pension reform continues to swell.
If the reform fails, “it would be dramatic for the country”
And the text is not definitively voted either. He still has to go before a joint joint committee from Wednesday. If Bruno Retailleau says he is “confident”, he stressed that “the Senate will not allow its achievements to be trampled. We have enriched the text on several points such as family policy, fraud or seniors. These are important lines and we cannot will not let them be trampled by the government,” he insisted.
If this step is taken, the text will then return to the Senate, before returning to the National Assembly for a final vote. If the government decides not to use 49.3 and does not obtain a majority in the Assembly on Thursday, the reform could still fail. An unthinkable situation for Bruno Retailleau. “Whether [la réforme échoue] in the event of a miscalculation, it would be tragic, obviously for Emmanuel Macron and the Prime Minister, which would not be an unsurpassable tragedy for me. But it would be dramatic for the country”, he insisted at the microphone of the Grand Rendez-vous.