Pensions: the left is considering a shared initiative referendum
Communist deputy Stéphane Peu announced Tuesday evening on BFMTV that the left-wing opposition was going to table a bill for a shared initiative referendum on the question of pensions.
“Article 11 of the Constitution authorizes us parliamentarians to table a bill for a referendum of shared initiative, which we are going to do”, launched the deputy for Seine-Saint-Denis.
The bill for a shared initiative referendum must be approved by at least 185 parliamentarians. “We have them and therefore we are going to table it”, assured Stéphane Peu, specifying that the referendum would be “for or against Emmanuel Macron’s proposal”. “He has no mandate to make this reform. It is not true that the majority of French people who voted for him to avoid Marine Le Pen, gave him a blank check to make this reform,” said the Communist MP.
If it is passed in parliament, the bill must then obtain the support of at least one tenth of the voters registered on the electoral lists, that is to say a little less than 5 million French voters. If the number of support is sufficient, the bill then returns to Parliament, where each of the two assemblies must examine it, adopting it or rejecting it.
The government’s pension reform plan is currently being debated in a joint committee (7 deputies and 7 senators). If it is approved, it will return to the Assembly on Thursday where the deputies will vote on it or reject it.
