“People have the right to enjoy life after having worked”, underlined Tuesday the head of the LFI deputies Mathilde Panot, who dreams of a victory on this text to “enact” the “end of macronie”. The text, approved without incident last week in committee, returns not only to the 2023 reform – which concerned the retirement age – but also to that carried out in 2013 by PS Minister Marisol Touraine – which had increased the duration contribution.
950 amendments
The socialist group will try to save the Touraine reform via an amendment from its deputy Arthur Delaporte, but will approve the proposal whatever happens to repeal the reduction in the age, warned its leader Boris Vallaud. If the text were adopted, it could then continue its parliamentary journey, according to the left, which planned to include it on January 23 on the Senate agenda, where it has no chance of being adopted by the majority of the right and the center, then on February 6 in second reading in the Assembly.
To do this, we still have to pass a first obstacle at the Palais Bourbon, where the debates, which start at 9 a.m., will end whatever happens at midnight. However, the deputies of the “governmental base” have tabled more than 950 amendments to this text, which should considerably lengthen the discussions, at the risk of preventing a vote on time. Some of these amendments aim to empty the proposal of its content, in whole or in part, or to postpone its application to 2055 or 2080.
Others are semantic additions, which qualify the proposed law as an “electoral and ideological approach”, or a reform with “disastrous financial and social consequences”. The deputies supporting the government “want to prevent the vote because they know that they would lose it”, commented the centrist Charles de Courson of the opposition group Liot, who is surprised that the “common base” uses such “techniques blocking” while he is threatened with censorship.
“Unbearable hypocrisy”
This offensive aroused anger in the ranks of the left: the spokesperson for the environmental group Benjamin Lucas saw it as “unworthy sabotage, as crude as it is grotesque” and the socialist Béatrice Bellay saw it as “thug methods”. As for Mathilde Panot, she castigated an “obstruction” crossing “all the thresholds of authoritarianism”, and her LFI party published on social networks the names of the authors of the “useless” amendments. La France insoumise has called for a rally at Les Invalides on Thursday at 7 p.m.
In the government camp, however, we emphasize that such a strategy is “good war”, as an LR MP points out. The protests of the New Popular Front amount to “unbearable hypocrisy”, said Budget Minister Laurent Saint-Martin on France Inter on Wednesday, observing that in 2023, when examining pension reform, the left had “deposited 19,000 amendments and caused the debates to last three weeks”.
