The chairman of the Finance Committee of the National Assembly, the Insoumis Eric Coquerel, gave the green light on Tuesday to the examination of the bill to repeal the retirement age at 64, rejecting the argument of his unconstitutionality brandished by the presidential camp.
The LFI deputy deemed the bill “admissible” in the name of a “flexible application” of the Constitution to defend “parliamentary initiative” and the “right of the opposition”.
The President of the National Assembly, Yaël Braun-Pivet (Renaissance), pleaded the opposite on Tuesday morning and assured that she would “take her responsibilities” to prevent the vote on this text expected on Wednesday in committee and on June 8 in the hemicycle.
The presidential camp has been waving for several weeks under article 40 of the Constitution, which provides that parliamentary initiatives are not admissible if they aggravate public charges.
All the presidents of the majority groups (Renaissance, MoDem, Horizons) immediately castigated the “partisan and political decision of Eric Coquerel”, a “serious attack on our institutions”.
The bill of the independent group Liot is “unquestionably inadmissible”, engaged the general rapporteur of the budget Jean-René Cazeneuve (Renaissance), who however thinks that the Social Affairs Committee will examine the text well on Wednesday.
Surrounded by several elected officials from the left-wing coalition Nupes, Eric Coquerel denounced during a press briefing the “pressures that have been made in recent days”, “a lot coming from the executive”: “I find it a bit paradoxical that the executive interferes at this point with a purely parliamentary decision”, he attacked.
He stressed that the members of the presidential majority had no “obligation” to seize the chairman of the Finance Committee and invoke Article 40 of the Constitution as they did. “It’s a partisan gesture, a political gesture to dismiss a text”, in a “partisan logic”, he lamented.
05/30/2023 12:17:31 – Paris (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
