The coordinator of La France insoumise Manuel Bompard will ask Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday to organize a referendum on pensions. CGT secretary general Sophie Binet followed suit on Tuesday. “We will bring to the President of the Republic the fact that there is a referendum that the French have been waiting for several months, it is a referendum on the project of postponing the retirement age to 64 years old”, announced on France 2 the deputy of Bouches-du-Rhône. “If the President of the Republic is considering one or more referendums, the priority is to get the French to vote on the issue of raising the retirement age to 64, that’s what the French have overwhelmingly demanded for months and months, so this is the only referendum I could support,” he insisted.
For her part, Sophie Binet assured France Inter that for her first interview with the President of the Republic, she was first going to tell him that “he must come down from his ivory tower”. “I hear with interest talk of a referendum and the first subject on which a referendum must be organized is the pension reform, because this reform is still not passing,” she added, assuring that this ” would break the deadlock.”
The Head of State must receive the parties represented in Parliament at the Legion of Honor education house in Saint-Denis, near Paris, in order to build legislative texts “together” and pave the way, “if necessary”, to referendums, in the absence of an absolute majority in the National Assembly.
“We are always available to make proposals, but if it is to participate in a media communication operation as he has done almost every year, I do not see the point”, added Manuel Bompard.
“So we’ll go to the time when we can make proposals”, but “going to eat with the President of the Republic, even with a large spoon, I don’t see the point”, he specified, while emphasizing discussing with its Nupes partners to come up with a “common response”. “Perhaps we will make a more detailed contribution by tomorrow with a certain number of substantive proposals”, particularly on the subject of back-to-school supplies, he continued.
Party leaders are invited to an afternoon of discussions and a dinner, a “loyally outstretched hand”, assures Emmanuel Macron, a few weeks after violent urban riots in order to find ways to “converge without denial or renunciation”. After wanting to dismiss the National Rally (RN) and La France insoumise (LFI), the Elysée changed its mind and finally invited these two formations, which the macronie nevertheless judges outside “the republican arc”.
Sophie Binet also intends to speak to the president about “union repression”. “It’s going too far, we have reached a milestone in this new school year with a national leader of the CGT who is summoned for the first time before the police station for having organized the mobilization during the pension reform, it is a signal that is given at the highest peak of the state which is extremely bad,” she lamented.
