Arnaud Benedetti is associate professor at Paris-Sorbonne University. He is editor-in-chief of the political and parliamentary review. He published
How are the politicians dead?
- The great malaise of power
(editions of Cerf, November 2021).
THE
FIGARO.
– After the agreement found in the joint joint committee on Wednesday, the government of Elisabeth Borne will resort to article 49 paragraph 3 of the Constitution to pass its pension reform.
Is this an admission of failure?
Arnaud BENEDETTI. -
Parliamentary impotence is inscribed as a corrosive germ in Emmanuel Macron's second five-year term.
The question had been asked for several days whether Emmanuel Macron and his government would be forced to use 49.3.
As far as I'm concerned, it was obvious except to take the risk of seeing the text "retoqué".
Since the spring of 2022, the five-year term has been hanging by a thread, that of a legislature without a real majority.
The executive and many observers were self-intoxicated: everyone imagined that the parliamentary situation, especially since the vote in the Senate, would be overcome.
They bet on the strength of the procedures, of the institutions, forgetting first of all that a majority of French people, very large and massive even among the working people,
was resolutely opposed to a reform deemed unfair and ineffective;
that the weight of this social opposition had an inevitable impact on part of the national representation, including moreover within the majority, even more among Les Républicains: quite simply because the deputies in their constituencies are directly confronted with the concerns , resentment and anger.
Read also Pension reform: at the end of the suspense, Elisabeth Borne sets in motion 49.3 in the National Assembly
The fact of having proposed a reform, which is considered to be too much of a regression with regard to the French social model, in an inflationary context and growing distrust of the institutions, as shown by the barometer of confidence produced by Cevipof, constitutes not only an obvious risk-taking, but also a form of casualness with regard to reality, which accumulates and sediments thicker layers every day of an opinion breaking with the dominant thought of the elites.
What is happening is of course powerlessness and a situation of denial, in which power imagines that it can continuously rise from its ashes… The problem is that macronism federates reluctantly and against him all the recriminations, sometimes contradictory,
of the social body.
And that he adds to it a permanent amnesia which makes him forget all the faults for which he has shown himself to be accountable, promising that he had learned from his past mistakes.
There comes a time when the real can no longer escape, when the real resists.
49.3, which is a constitutional tool that could not be more standardized, was so demonized by the opposition that the government hesitated to use it and waited until the last moment to use it.
Arnaud Benedetti
Can the use of 49.3 weaken the executive? Can we imagine that it crystallizes the anger of the "popular bloc" hostile to this reform?
49.3, which is a constitutional tool that could not be more standardized, was so demonized by the opposition that the government itself hesitated to use it and waited until the last moment, after days of boasting, to make use of.
This use in extremis is not only an admission of weakness, but the translation of a form of panic.
There is something exceptionally worrying about this 49.3 for power, because it takes the form of the figure of the king in chess who is in the process of being cornered, whose margins of maneuver are constantly being reduced, and who comes up against the few squares that will allow it a few slender ounces of displacement.
By deciding the blocked vote, the government opens a trapdoor under its seat: it sends back the image of a desperate government, out of breath.
Read also Pension reform: “We found that the account was not there”, deplores Élisabeth Borne
The acceptability of this 49.3 took a hit;
evidence of this are the demonstrations that took place in Paris and in many provincial towns as soon as it was announced.
It could be that this pension reform is the regressive reform too much like the use of 49.3, the 49.3 too many... All the stakes in the zone of turbulence crossed will consist, for the executive, in preventing young university and high school students from do not enter massively into the social movement.
If that were the case, we would approach the shores of a major crisis... A few weeks ago with Stéphane Rozés, in these same columns, we evoked the hypothesis of a synchronization of anger.
Undeniably the 49.3 is an incendiary fuse, the scope of which should not be underestimated in the present circumstances.
Who ultimately benefits from this forced passage?
The power will obviously strive to return the disorders, which followed the commitment of the responsibility of the government, as a lever to try to regain control of a situation which escaped it.
The fact remains that it is faced with a motion of censure which, for the first time, has an amplitude of aggregation without precedent under this legislature.
The group that files it has nothing extremist, it is even the illustration of territorial France, the one that is often not listened to by Paris, even despised but which, contrary to what is reproached to Macronism, the dimension above ground, is in phase with the country in its geographical and social diversity.
If the majority is on the verge of collapse, what about the Republicans who made the mistake of not allowing their parliamentarians freedom to vote.
Arnaud Benedetti
We have seen since January 19, the date of the start of the mobilizations against the reform project, how much the provinces, medium-sized towns and sometimes small towns were at the forefront of this movement.
Nothing at this stage is certain: the motion can only have a chance of succeeding if half of the LRs vote.
These are divided, and the famous call for coherence that their leaders want to carry, is not shared by all their deputies, probably even less by their activists and sympathizers, many of whom are moved by a visceral anti-macronism.
If the majority is on the verge of collapse, what about the Republicans who made the mistake of not allowing their parliamentarians freedom to vote.
As for the left, in particular LFI, it is engaged in a strategy of destabilization in which it ends up believing, and whose radicalism could certainly bear some fruit in terms of remobilization, but which will not fail to generate a number of allergies either. among broad segments of opinions.
As a result, I'll let you guess who would mainly benefit from the situation, even if we should remain cautious as events have rarely been so volatile.
