Jacques Serais with AFP
modified to
1:42 p.m., March 16, 2023
Sign of the growing tension: after a first morning meeting, the main ministers, party and group leaders in the National Assembly were again gathered around the head of state Thursday at midday. The Élysée assured that it was not a question of a Council of Ministers, whose green light would be necessary to activate 49.3.
Emmanuel Macron must decide between the possibility of going to a vote on his flagship project or the need to resort to this article of the Constitution, which allows the adoption of the project without a vote, except for a motion of censure adopted against the government.
“We are two, three votes apart” in favor of the text
The Senate, for its part, unsurprisingly confirmed Thursday morning its vote in favor of the reform by 193 votes against 114. The main union leaders, gathered near the National Assembly, for their part reiterated their call to “vote against” a text according to them “unfair” and “brutal”.
Macronist strategists are busy trying to find out if they have a majority of deputies, with all the counts showing extremely little room for maneuver. “We are two, three votes apart” in favor of the text, according to a source within the executive.
According to the presidential entourage, the phones continued to heat up Thursday morning with the LR deputies, the independent elected Liot and the Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne will make her “recommendation” at the beginning of the afternoon, before the final decision. “My conviction is that we must go to the vote” and “we will have a majority to vote for this reform”, assures again Thursday morning the president of the Renaissance group, Aurore Bergé. But, on the side of the right-wing deputies Les Républicains, whose contribution is decisive, “we are between 30 and 35 for and about twenty against”, which makes a vote “very, very, very risky”, judges the leader of the senators LR favorable to the text, Bruno Retailleau.
After weeks of fierce debates and negotiations under high tension, Emmanuel Macron’s extremely unpopular reform should in principle have its parliamentary epilogue on Thursday. A compromise sealed Wednesday between seven deputies and seven senators, after more than eight hours of debate behind the closed doors of a joint joint committee (CMP), paved the way for a vote in the two assemblies for this project moving back to 64 years retirement age.
All the spotlights will be on the Palais Bourbon from 3:00 p.m. Without an absolute majority, the government is dependent on the LR deputies, who are divided and much more skeptical of the reform than their fellow senators.
Divided LR deputies
On Wednesday evening, Emmanuel Macron also considered, in the event of a vote and defeat in the hemicycle, the possibility of dissolution, according to majority executives. It would allow “a clarification” in front of the voters, in particular for the right-wing deputies, pleaded Aurore Bergé. But Bruno Retailleau does not believe it “not for a moment” because beyond the right, “the Renaissance group would obviously also lose” seats.
Dissolution ? “Chiche”, launched the boss of the National Rally Marine Le Pen, who denounced “corruption”, “scheming” and “proposals to buy votes” towards the hesitant deputies.
The President of the Republic plays very big on this parliamentary sequence. It is about the continuation of his second five-year term and his ability to reform. The concessions granted to the LR deputies, in particular on long careers, did not dispel doubts about the voting intentions of the deputies of this undisciplined group. Despite the “advances” of the CMP praised by their president, Olivier Marleix, several of them did not hide their moods. The deputy of the Territoire de Belfort Ian Boucard explained, after a meeting of his group on Wednesday evening, that he “continues to vote against” because he is “against the postponement of the retirement age”.
The unions remain mobilized
In the event of recourse to 49.3, the opposition would not fail to qualify the absence of a vote as an undemocratic act which, according to the union leaders, would be likely to harden the social movement. “Nothing is over”, warned the leader of the Insoumis deputies Mathilde Panot, announcing that her group would vote Thursday in favor of the motion to reject the Liot group, before a probable referral to the Constitutional Council in the event of adoption of the text.
In the aftermath of Wednesday’s demonstrations (which brought together 1.7 million people according to the CGT and 480,000 according to the Ministry of the Interior), the unions remain as mobilized as ever. The passage of the reform would leave a “social debt” among workers, which risks being exploited by populists and “particularly the far right”, warned Thursday the secretary of the CFDT Laurent Berger. But the movement is showing some signs of running out of steam. The demonstrators are less numerous in the streets and in crucial sectors like transport, the strikes do not last or are little followed.