“Only fools don’t change”: experienced but misunderstood MP, centrist Bertrand Pancher has become one of the figures in the challenge to pension reform in the Assembly, a reversal that infuriates the macronists .
At the head of the independent group Liot, the elected representative of the Meuse carries a bill to repeal the reform which shakes the presidential camp. The text is expected in committee on Wednesday and in the hemicycle on June 8.
Bertrand Pancher and his colleague Charles de Courson continue to pound an “unfair” reform, led by a now “illegitimate” government. And they recently displayed their determination alongside the boss of the CGT Sophie Binet.
A composite gathering of centrists, socialist dissidents, ultra-marines and Corsican autonomists, their Liot group was already at work to try to bring down the government by a motion of censure, rejected by nine votes on March 20.
“Populist attitude”, “spendthrift coming-out”: tense, the macronists multiply the attacks against the “turnarounds” of Bertrand Pancher and Charles de Courson, and their bill “which has no chance of succeeding”. They unearthed amendments from 2013, when the two centrists pleaded for the postponement of the legal retirement age to 64 years.
The two deputies also voted for Valérie Pécresse in the first round of the presidential election, while the right-wing candidate promised retirement at 65.
Their current position is “completely inconsistent” with their past. It’s “grotesque”, squeaks the president of the Renaissance group Aurore Bergé. The “opportunistic turns”, “this can make our fellow citizens doubt the sincerity of a political commitment”, adds Elisabeth Borne.
Deputy since 2007, Bertrand Pancher sweeps the critics. The former mayor of Bar-Le-Duc and ex-president of the General Council of the Meuse – he devoted his life to politics – claims to “listen” to the French and “defend Parliament”, rather than “l imprisonment of Emmanuel Macron”.
This father of four children claims to have clearly taken a position against the pension reform during the legislative elections. And he talks about his farming parents who “started working early”.
“My spine is always the same”, underlines the elected official, passed by the UDF, the UMP, the UDI and the Radical Party: “a centrist Christian Democrat commitment”, the defense of “ecology” and “territories”.
His “friend” and former minister Jean-Louis Borloo inspires him, he says, by welcoming the “miracle” of the Grenelle de l’environnement in 2007.
Soon to be 65, Bertrand Pancher would like to capitalize on the media exposure offered to him by the fight for pensions. With several colleagues from his parliamentary group, he launched a political association: “Utiles”, to bring together the “humanists” in the field, all the “Girondins of the Republic”.
“We will not be absent from the Europeans” of 2024, he promises, referring to “close contacts” with Jean Lassalle, the former deputy shepherd of the Pyrénées-Atlantiques, iconoclastic candidate for the presidential elections 2017 and 2022.
In the National Assembly, Bertrand Pancher would even dream of a “new majority” of “coalition”, associated with a government “from LR to environmentalists and socialists”.
Has he taken the big head? “Vanity of vanities, everything is vanity and pursuit of the wind”, sweeps this “fairly convinced Catholic”, who goes “once in two” to the “parliamentarian mass” on Wednesday morning in Sainte-Clotilde, next to the Palais- Bourbon.
At Liot, his relatives praise his “great listening” and his “ability to hold the group” of 21 elected officials, despite some tensions with colleagues from the UDI, in the center right.
“We get along well, we work well,” said Christophe Naegelen (UDI). But we “must remain balanced, not be excessive or presumptuous”, warns the deputy of the Vosges, who was against the motion of censure of March 20 but signed the proposal to repeal the pension reform .
Salt and pepper hair and face partially paralyzed by a serious fall when he was a child, Bertrand Pancher sometimes moves away from the tumult of politics for his other passion: giraffes, discovered thanks to a development project in Niger, in the reserve of Koure. “There is nothing more majestic than a giraffe eating acacia leaves,” he says.
05/30/2023 08:28:10 – Paris (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
