It was an almost mechanical ritual for Elisabeth Borne, but a first for Gabriel Attal: the new prime minister faced, on Monday February 5, a motion of censure tabled by the left. Unsurprisingly, the text was not adopted: only 124 deputies voted in favor, far from the 289 votes required for the adoption of the motion. The Republicans (LR) and the National Rally did not support the text.
As it did against Elisabeth Borne, the left criticizes the Prime Minister for not having requested a vote of confidence from the National Assembly after his general policy declaration on Tuesday. And she accuses Gabriel Attal of wanting to wage “war on the poor”, with his announcements on the abolition of the specific solidarity allowance, replaced by the RSA, for the unemployed at the end of their rights or the promise of relaxation of the law SRU on social housing.
In the hemicycle, Gabriel Attal denounced a “preventive motion of censure”, at the initiative of the left which, according to him, advocates “permanent blocking” and wants to revive a “collectivist myth”. “Last week, a new record was broken”, that of “speed of tabling a motion of censure”, estimated the Prime Minister who pledged to “always keep [his] door open” for negotiation , to “always respect Parliament and the debate of ideas”
“Everyone knows that you are only obliged” by Emmanuel Macron, launched Manuel Bompard, coordinator of La France insoumise (LFI), before the head of government spoke. Mr. Bompard assured that he was defending a motion to “protect the people from suffering”, from the rise in energy prices, from medical deductibles and even from the “reduction in unemployment benefits”.
Amélie Oudéa-Castera at the center of LFI criticism
Tuesday, in the Assembly, several speakers had targeted the youth of the new Prime Minister in the “beautiful neighborhoods”, from the prestigious “Alsatian [private] school” to Sciences Po, to the ministries and to Matignon, at only 34 years old. . “You are defending France from the Champs-Elysées roundabout,” the boss of the socialist group Boris Vallaud reprimanded him.
The head of LFI deputies Mathilde Panot had led the charge against Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, the minister of national education and sports, in turmoil since her comments about her children being educated in the private sector, in Stanislas, in the 6th arrondissement of Paris. It’s a “symbol of your whole government,” “oligarchy, over here; upper middle class that way.”
On the far right, Marine Le Pen had suggested that her troops would not vote for the motion, announced by the left “even before Gabriel Attal’s speech”: “this discredits those who tabled it”, she judges. She. The Republicans also planned to vote against the motion. “We are in opposition, we had no vocation to vote for confidence. But voting for censorship before the government has started would not seem very serious to us either,” Olivier Marleix, leader of the LR deputies, noted on Sunday on Radio J.
At least at this stage, because the right is raising its voice after the Constitutional Council’s broad censorship of the immigration law and Gabriel Attal’s announcement of a reform of state medical aid for foreigners through regulations, rather than by a text before Parliament.