Pensions: Elisabeth Borne addresses a plea of inadmissibility at the request of union leaders
Cold anger and dialogue of the deaf. It was a bit of the atmosphere this Wednesday in the Senate between the left and the team of Elisabeth Borne during the opening of current affairs questions to the government.
“You are going to sacrifice 18 million French people on the altar of financial profitability” with the decline in the legal retirement age from 62 to 64, thundered the president of the PS group, Patrick Kanner, the day after ‘ a new day of massive mobilization and after – once is not customary in the Senate – a restless night on text review . The left-wing groups have in fact ended up leaving the Hemicycle in anger after the use of article 38 of the rules of procedure which speeds up the debates and the opinion of the Social Affairs Committee, which has deemed inadmissible thousands of sub-amendments tabled in the process…
“France is on the verge of social implosion”
“You are in the minority and you are doing everything so that the debate cannot take place”, continued the senator from the North, before letting go: “France is on the verge of social implosion and you are looking elsewhere. “And to relay the request of the numbers one of the inter-union to be received “urgently” by Emmanuel Macron or Elisabeth Borne to ask them again to withdraw the reform.
This was for the Prime Minister, as government spokesperson Olivier Véran before her, the opportunity to address the unions to an end of inadmissibility. “The government is always ready and open to dialogue”, she replied, before sending them back to the Minister of Labor, Olivier Dussopt, with whom, according to several of them, the consultations did not leave the best memory: “His door is always open”, she hammered.
Brouhaha on the benches of the left
The Prime Minister also stressed that Tuesday’s mobilization day was held “with substantially the same number of people as at the end of January”, causing a hubbub on the benches of the left. A way for Elisabeth Borne to signify that this day, certainly important, had not been the announced tidal wave. An attempt, too, to discourage the next ones, scheduled for this Saturday then the day of the joint joint committee, this meeting of 7 deputies and 7 senators supposed to try to find an agreement on a common text on Wednesday March 15.
If she welcomed demonstrations “without overflow in most cases”, she condemned, among other things, the power cuts, of which the permanence of the President of the Senate, Gérard Larcher, was for example a victim. “The right to strike is not the right to block”, she again launched, also calling on the senators to examine the text “without tension, without blocking, with a sincere desire for debate”.
Article 42 of the rules of procedure
But the debates, precisely, then resumed in the Senate in a rather tense atmosphere against a backdrop of procedural guerrilla warfare when there remained 75 amendments to be examined on Article 7. The Conference of Presidents in fact allowed the use of another weapon in the arsenal available to speed up the debates, with article 42 of the rules of procedure, by deciding to limit speeches to one speaker per group as well as explanations of vote on the article until the end consideration of the bill. The same decision was taken throughout the text.
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The strategy of the executive remains the same: to obtain, in addition to the vote on article 7 in the Senate, a vote on the whole of the text, at the same time as a breathlessness of mobilization and strikes, that inflation makes it more difficult. In the meantime, the executive is closely monitoring the call for mobilization this Thursday by youth organizations.
Gas station rushes
In transportation , traffic should continue to improve this Thursday at the RATP (it will get closer to normal on Friday), but remained disrupted at the SNCF. The ports of Le Havre, Rouen, Brest, Bayonne and La Rochelle were blocked on Wednesday, as were fuel shipments at the exit from the refineries of TotalEnergies and Esso-ExxonMobil. At the end of the day, Wednesday, nearly 6% of service stations had run out of either diesel or gasoline, and this, not because of the strikes according to the oil sector (distribution is not affected) but the rush at the pump of worried motorists still marked by the episode of shortages this fall. A black spot for the government, far from having come to the end of its troubles.
The discussions and counts of the future votes of the deputies on the text which are going well between the government and the leaders of the majority and of LR, do not allow, for the moment, and despite the concessions already made, to have a majority provided to the Assembly next week.
