The President of the Senate Gérard Larcher (LR) expressed his reluctance on Saturday to initiate a reform of the institutions, as Emmanuel Macron wishes. “We are always ready to examine what improves the functioning of democracy: simplification, decentralization, and we are working on it… But is this the time?” asked Gérard Larcher in an interview with Le Parisien.
“If you ask the French about their concerns, I doubt they will answer: ‘Reform of the Court of Justice of the Republic, reform of the Superior Council of the Judiciary or proportional to the National Assembly’. Instead, I hear about inflation and a crisis in public services,” he argued.
For his part, Emmanuel Macron hammers his will to move forward on this subject, after having stumbled over it during his first five-year term. In his televised address on Monday, the Head of State said he wanted to present “main avenues so that the functioning of our institutions becomes more efficient and citizen participation”.
The Head of State has also recently received at the Élysée Gérard Larcher as well as the President of the Assembly Yaël Braun-Pivet (Renaissance) to discuss these questions. If Ms. Braun-Pivet said she was in favor of a reform, she also questioned the timing, the pension crisis not opening according to her “not a favorable climate”. For the President of the Senate, “the return of confidence is not the institutional construction game as a priority”.
The President of the Senate also pointed to the “crisis of governance and confidence” that the country is going through, according to him, “linked to the absence of results, to an overly vertical governance, to a sprawling bureaucracy, to this France of side that feels forgotten and takes refuge in abstention, but also in the absence of an absolute majority in the National Assembly”.
“We must regain closeness with the French”, further pleaded the elected official of Yvelines, whose name sometimes comes up to replace Élisabeth Borne at Matignon, if however the president finds an agreement with Les Républicains. But “the political conditions today are not met”, underlined Mr. Larcher, without however formally excluding the hypothesis.
“We have major disagreements with the policy pursued by the executive, on public spending, on decentralization, on the sovereign…”, he further argued, assuring that his “horizon” was his candidacy for the senatorial elections. of September, and his renewal as President of the Senate.
Gérard Larcher also urged the right to find “coherence, cohesion and a political line”, after being torn on the pension reform. “We need a strategy, a line, before thinking about the presidential election,” he insisted.
