A new way to avoid the vote of the National embly? The three groups constituting the majority in the National embly (Renaissance, MoDem, Horizons) agreed on Tuesday to have recourse to Article 40 of the Constitution against a text presented by the Liot group (Freedoms, Independents, Overseas and Territories). The latter tabled a bill aimed at repealing raising the retirement age to 64which is to be debated in the embly Chamber on 8 June.
With article 40 of the Constitution, the members of the majority want to raise the financial inadmissibility of this bill and thus prevent it from being ped. According to this article, “proposals and amendments formulated by members of Parliament are not admissible when their adoption would result in either a reduction in public resources, or the creation or aggravation of a public charge. »
In short, this text opposes the tabling of parliamentary amendments if these have the effect of increasing public expenditure. Objective ? Avoid potential budget overruns. It “authorizes the reduction of a public resource only insofar as it is compensated by the increase of another resource”, explains the site of the National embly.
An article already criticized several times
“Article 40 is one of the elements of the organization of democratic life so that we do not discuss subjects which are unfunded subjects for example”, for his part declared this Tuesday on Radio J Franck Riester, Minister in charge of Relations with Parliament.
The Liot group’s proposal indeed touches on a financial subject, the text provides for the organization of a social conference to decide how to finance the future deficit of pension funds other than by raising the legal retirement age to 64 years old. And “this bill is not admissible from a public finance point of view” ured this Tuesday on Europe 1 Renaissance deputy Jean-René Cazeneuve, general rapporteur of the finance committee.
Several elected officials have already opposed the use of this article of the Constitution. The president of the LFI group Mathilde Panot ruled on Tuesday that preventing the vote on the text repealing the postponement of the retirement age would be an “extremely serious precedent for the separation of powers” between Parliament and the executive, “it there is no precedent for a bill that would have been deemed admissible and then deemed inadmissible,” she insisted at a press conference.
This is not the first time that this article 40 has been criticized by elected officials, it is even regularly singled out by parliamentarians for the restriction it imposes in their bills. Already in 2008, the presidents of the finance committees of the National embly and the Senate at the time published a column to request the deletion of this article.