The French Constitutional Council has rejected a referendum proposal put forward by left-wing opposition parties to annul French President Emmanuel Macron's controversial pension reform, which has already been enacted and comes into force in September. This law raises the retirement age from 62 to 64 years and is opposed by almost the entire parliamentary arch and 70% of French.
This referendum was one of the few legislative avenues left for opponents of the reform to prevent it from being applied. The left had already presented a first referendum proposal (RIP, in its French acronym), but this council of wise men who decide whether or not the laws conform to the Constitution decided to reject it on April 14 (the same day that approved the pension reform), considering that it did not meet the requirements.
This second proposal, which proposed to prohibit raising the retirement age beyond 62 years, has not been valued either. The Council considers that the proposal does not conform to article 11 of the Constitution, which allows the presentation of a referendum as long as it has to do with a "reform related to the social policy of the Nation". Consider that this is not the case.
Even if it had been accepted, it is a cumbersome and long process, which involved obtaining almost five million signatures and there are no precedents for any consultation that has come to fruition in this regard. In addition, the acceptance of this referendum did not prevent the law from beginning to be applied in September.
This is a new triumph for Macron, who promulgated the law two weeks ago after receiving the approval of the Constitutional Council, and another blow for the opposition, which will no longer be able to present another referendum demand within a year and sees how its Attempts to prevent the law from being applied fail.
Parliamentarians now have another alternative to annul the law, and it is the bill presented by the independent group Liot to annul the delay in retirement at 64 years of age. Liot is the group that presented a motion of censure against the Government a month and a half ago that was only nine votes away from prospering.
If that had been the case, it would have knocked down the reform and forced the Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, to resign. Being a group made up of independent deputies, their proposal had the support of both the extreme right and the left. This bill is presented in the Assembly on June 8.
Two days before, a new day of street demonstrations against the law will be held, the fourteenth since it has been done in the four months that the protests have been taking place. Because the union front is not throwing in the towel in its fight either. On Tuesday they met to define what to do from now on, since the law has already been enacted. At the moment they have set this new date.
The last demonstration was held on the 1st, coinciding with Labor Day, and was one of the largest and most violent to date. There were 540 detainees and 403 injured police officers, in addition to 61 protesters. A Molotov cocktail thrown by groups of radicals burned a policeman.
The government spokesman, Olivier Véran, today condemned these acts of violence and said that the government is considering preparing an "anti-radical law" to persecute all the people "who do not go to the marches to demonstrate, but to do harm and kill ", has said.
Just this Wednesday, the day that freedom of the press is celebrated, a report has been published in France criticizing that there has been an "excess of preventive detentions in demonstrations" in the country since the movement against this law began, the key reform for Macron, and the one that has plummeted his popularity to the lowest levels.
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