The Head of State wants to show that he has not given up a reform supposed to “restore popular sovereignty”, and which could understand the seven -year term, the electoral or proportional calendar. This, despite the tensions around the pensions and the weakening of his majority in the National Assembly.
by Claire Gatinois
François Hollande put aside the resentments of the past before going, Friday, February 3, at the Elysée. For the third time since 2017, the former president responded, accepting a tête-à-tête lunch with Emmanuel Macron. “The embarrassment is not on my side,” confided, a few weeks ago, the socialist, evoking his rare aside with the one who was his deputy secretary general and his Minister of the Economy. The page is – almost – tour.
of this presidential exchange of more than two and a half hours, little filtered. Apart from the fact that the agenda desired by Emmanuel Macron was largely discussed, that of the institutions of the V e Republic. François Hollande had ideas to suggest to the current president, like that of removing the Prime Minister, whom he approaches in his book to respond to the democratic crisis (Fayard, 2019).
Emmanuel Macron will have heard it. After having failed twice, during his first mandate, to carry out an institutional reform supposed to provide an answer to the democratic discomfort, the tenant of the Elysée wants to show that the subject, included in his program, was not forget. “I think that the reform that we need must restore popular sovereignty,” he said to a handful of mid-January editorialists. Adding: “You have to give yourself the ambition to do something big, otherwise I am not to do it.”
Consultations
The message is clear. The site must not be summed up with a simple grooming of the Constitution. But when the street and the assembly ignite on pension reform, is it appropriate to embark on an institutional big bang? A change in the constitution requires being approved by the two identical voting chambers, then by the majority of three fifths of the votes cast by the entire parliament gathered in congresses. “Unattainable,” says Bruno Retailleau, president of the Les Républicains group in the Senate. As for the option of a referendum, after the vote of the two chambers, “it is likely that the French are more interested in the author of the question than in the question asked,” said the Senator of Vendée.
Despite these obstacles, Macronie starts. “After pensions, we will have to reform our institutions,” announced, in an interview with Le Figaro on January 12, Stéphane Séjénéné, secretary general of the Renaissance presidential party. On the same day, Emmanuel Macron brought together the presidents of the majority law commission to open the site.
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