Two weeks after the partial censorship of the Immigration law by the Constitutional Council, the Republicans counterattack.
The party hopes to resurrect several measures rejected by the Sages at the end of January, by submitting them to a shared initiative referendum (RIP).
“It is now a question of giving voice to the French people so that they can decide directly by referendum,” he announced.
A perilous bet, since this legislative procedure, supposed to offer a democratic revival, has never yet been crowned with success.
What is RIP?
LR assures that his proposed law, composed of five articles, can indeed open the way to such a procedure, since according to him it falls under “the social policy of the nation within the meaning of the first paragraph of article 11 of the Constitution ".
The RIP, enshrined in the Constitution since 2008, makes it possible to organize a referendum on a proposed law as long as it concerns the areas listed in this article 11, which in fact includes "the organization of public authorities, on reforms relating to the economic, social or environmental policy of the Nation and the public services which contribute to it”.
In its project, LR thus planned to focus on several measures censored by the Sages, such as the establishment of a “duration of residence condition” for the payment of certain social benefits to foreigners in a legal situation or even the return of the abandonment of State Medical Aid, a system allowing the same public to benefit from access to care.
On the other hand, he took care not to include either the loss of nationality or the questioning of land rights in this project, measures which “would not fall within the scope of Article 11”, indicated a party source at AFP.
What are the steps to take?
But if the proposal could hit the nail on the head in its content, it is still necessary to validate all the procedural levels.
“For many jurists, it is a system that is not designed to succeed”, the fault of a “very heavy administrative machinery”, noted Bruno Daugeron, professor of public law at the University of Paris-Cité, interviewed by Le Parisien in March 2023 regarding a RIP then considered by the left in the matter of pension reform.
The RIP indeed requires several conditions that are difficult to tick.
A real obstacle course opens for LR: the project must bring together 20% of parliamentarians, or 185 elected officials in total, before obtaining validation from the Constitutional Council.
The Sages have one month to verify whether the proposed referendum law meets the required conditions and give their approval or not.
After that, it will still be necessary to ensure within nine months the support of 10% of the electorate, or nearly five million people.
Any French citizen registered on the electoral roll can do so, mainly via a dedicated website.
If Parliament does not examine the proposal within six months after collecting citizen signatures, the President of the Republic submits the text to a referendum.
It is only then that the French are consulted to decide on the proposed law.
The support of 10% of voters, an insurmountable bar?
The first step seems within reach for LR: with 133 senators and 62 deputies, almost all of whom voted for the text on immigration during the debates in December, the party should have no difficulty in uniting 185 parliamentarians around his project.
But you must then obtain validation from the Sages.
The last two RIP attempts, on pension reform, were rejected.
We then have to convince voters, a task that promises to be difficult.
If the right insists that a “very large majority of French people were in favor” of the measures censored at the end of January by the Constitutional Council, it will be necessary to prove it by rallying some 4.8 million voters to their cause, to only hope that the referendum can see the light of day.
Last October, ahead of the debates in Parliament, the party launched an online petition against “uncontrolled immigration”, which only collected just over 26,000 signatures, as we recalled in this article.
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The project is so dangerous that to date, no parliamentary proposal has resulted in the organization of an RIP.
The text against the privatization of the ADP group, the first RIP launched in 2019, had just crossed the million support mark.
In a first assessment of the procedure published in June 2020, the Constitutional Council considered that it was “dissuasive and difficult to understand for citizens”, in particular because the bar of 10% of voters to be reached can be discouraging, just as the electronic device for collecting this support, “often perceived as being complex to use”.