After more than four hours of meeting Thursday, deputies and senators finally failed to reach an agreement on the bill establishing the vaccine pass, which will have to leave for a shuttle between Assembly and Senate for its final adoption, said Yaël Braun-Pivet (LREM) in front of the press.
After more than four hours of meeting Thursday, deputies and senators finally failed to reach an agreement on the bill establishing the vaccine pass, which will have to leave for a shuttle between Assembly and Senate for its final adoption, said Yaël Braun-Pivet (LREM) in front of the press.
A tweet that turns everything upside down
“We had obtained an agreement in principle” on the text but a tweet before the end of the meeting of the boss of senators LR Bruno Retailleau, evoking a “victory of common sense” of his people, caused “intolerable damage” to the functioning of the Parliament, denounced the President of the Assembly’s Law Commission. Bruno Retailleau had tweeted that the mixed committee of deputies and senators, in which he did not participate, had “proved in favor of the Senate” and that “the pass is intended to protect the French and nothing else… no offense to Emmanuel Macron”.
Ms. Braun-Pivet retorted working “not to win or lose, but (well) to protect the French”. The agreement seemed close, however, despite the significantly different versions voted on at first reading by the Assembly a week ago, and by the Senate dominated by the right on the night of Wednesday to Thursday. “The changes proposed by the Senate had only one objective: to allow an agreement within the LRs”, according to the leader of the LREM deputies Christophe Castaner.
The National Assembly will have the last word
The deputies must put the work back on the job from Thursday evening in committee, then Friday afternoon in the hemicycle. After a new reading in the upper house, it is the Assembly that will have the last word, possibly during the weekend or at the beginning of the week. Faced with the galloping epidemic of Covid-19, which even reached the Minister of Health Olivier Véran on Thursday, the government hopes that the vaccination pass will come into force around January 20, subject to possible appeal to the Constitutional Council.