Elisabeth Borne has heard the growing dissatisfaction with the pension reform. She will “move”, she promised in the Sunday press, on February 5, and this involves responding to the demands… of right-wing deputies, supposed to sit in the opposition.
Incredible as it may seem, when millions of people have marched in the streets since January 19, and they are preparing to continue to do so to demand the withdrawal of the bill and its flagship measure, the postponement from the legal age of departure to 64, the prime minister’s priority is to seek a compromise with those who will allow her to save her text, against the opinion of seven out of ten French people.
A kind of parliamentary rescue, the head of government hoping to find there the democratic legitimacy which is so cruelly lacking in her project. Basically, what is conceded is a skin of grief: thus the possibility of leaving at full rate “from” 63 years old, when you started working at 20 years old, which remains a pure regression compared to the rules current. About 30,000 people per year would be affected by this alms, what a great deal! This is less than 5% of some 700,000 annual retirements.
Beyond the incredible arm of honor constituted by this “opening” against the grain of history, it paradoxically demonstrates the extreme difficulty in which the government finds itself trapped. Caught between a powerful social movement, itself energized by the very broad trade union unity, a leftist opposition united on the essentials – the refusal to raise the retirement age – and an uncertain parliamentary majority, the executive cannot afford to play without damage from 49.3, as he has done on other texts.
The legitimacy of the law, even of power itself, would risk being tainted for good. We are no longer, in fact, in the situation of Nicolas Sarkozy, being able to count on his almost 350 deputies against “the street” to have the adoption of the decline in retirement from 60 to 62 years in 2010, nor even in the configuration of 2020. , at the time of the adoption by 49.3 of the points system – finally abandoned –, drawn at the time against the opposition, and not for lack of a majority.
Elisabeth Borne cannot take the risk of confronting both the social movement and Parliament. Not wanting to yield anything to the first, she tries to snatch the vote of the second by coaxing the most right-wing deputies, who are themselves caught between their convictions and their voters, who are far from massively supporting the reform of the government.
This fragility surfaces when, no later than the day of the great mobilization of January 31, the Defense Committee of the National Assembly, yet with a Macronist-LR majority, very symbolically rejects Article 7 relating to the retirement age. , by 13 votes against 22. This shows how much the outcome of the fight is not written in advance. All the more reason not to give up and participate in numbers in the next days of strikes and demonstrations.
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