Pension reform: what is the referendum of shared initiative, initiated by the left?

Some 250 parliamentarians, deputies and senators, mainly from the left, filed a request for a shared initiative referendum (RIP) with the Constitutional Council on Monday, while the pension reform was adopted in Parliament the same day.

How it works ?

The shared initiative referendum provides for the possibility of organizing a popular consultation on a bill. For this, 185 of the 925 parliamentarians must table a so-called “referendum” bill. In the current situation, the RIP is already supported by 250 parliamentarians. Then, the Council must verify its admissibility, by looking in particular whether the consultation relates to the areas of “the organization of public powers, reforms relating to economic, social or environmental policy and to the public services which contribute thereto”.

If the request is admissible…

If the request is admissible, it could open the collection of citizen signatures, in an attempt to reach 10% of voters, or 4.87 million signatures, within nine months, to pave the way for a referendum. . If the signatures are obtained, the National Assembly and the Senate have six months to examine the new bill. If they do not succeed, the President of the Republic must submit it to a French referendum.

In their text, the left-wing parliamentarians judge that the “choice of extending working hours accentuates social inequalities and is particularly harmful to the most vulnerable populations”. They propose to submit to a referendum the fact that retirement “cannot be fixed beyond the age of 62”.

A complex procedure?

The shared initiative referendum (RIP) has never succeeded since its introduction into the Constitution in 2008, on the initiative of Nicolas Sarkozy. A request for RIP had been launched in 2019-2020 to challenge the privatization of Aéroports de Paris, but stopping at just over a million signatures, below the necessary threshold. However, the government had suspended its privatization project due to the coronavirus crisis which had hit the air transport sector hard.