The right-wing majority Senate on Friday largely rejected a left-wing referendum request on the government’s pension reform that would raise the legal age to 64.
The senators, who will resume the examination of the reform at 5 p.m., rejected by 251 votes against 93 this “referendum motion”, defended by the leader of the PS group Patrick Kanner on behalf of the three leftist groups, socialist, communist and ecologist.
Patrick Kanner castigated a reform of “profitability, whatever the cost”, carried out by “right-wing forces against the French, in frontal opposition”.
He accused the government of “parliamentary piracy”, pointing to the time constrained in parliament by the procedure chosen by the executive.
“Common sense is to withdraw this reform, failing to have the courage to present it to the French,” said Mr. Kanner.
In response, Labor Minister Olivier Dussopt defended the “legitimacy” of “representative democracy and Parliament to debate pensions” and their “technical provisions”, ruling out a referendum and its “binary question”.
Previously, the communist Laurence Cohen had denounced an “institutional coup” with a bill “not submitted to a vote” by the National Assembly at first reading, for lack of time.
And the leader of the environmental group Guillaume Gontard to castigate the “autocratic drift of an above-ground executive isolated in his ivory tower” and his reform of “accountants in gray suits”.
“At least in his time (early 2020, the former Prime Minister) Edouard Philippe had the courage to propose a real bill and a vision”, which “we disputed”, he estimated.
The general rapporteur Elisabeth Doineau (centrist) criticized this “binary” request for a referendum: “Obviously ask the French to make an effort, they will answer no. But if we tell them, do you want to save the pay-as-you-go system, they will say yes “.
LR Alain Milon defended an “urgent reform” and sent the left back to the Touraine reform of 2014, under François Hollande, who already planned to “work longer” gradually by 2035.
But the text is “perhaps not proposed at the right time, the government should have taken into account the Senate’s proposals much earlier”, he judged.
Referendum motions are rare in the Senate, the last dating back to 2014.
In the National Assembly, a request for a referendum made by the National Rally on this pension reform was rejected in early February.
The left-wing deputies, who wanted to defend their own motion but had lost to the RN in a draw, had deserted the hemicycle to denounce a “masquerade”.
03/03/2023 14:37:03 – Paris (AFP) – © 2023 AFP