Since 2008, parliamentarians can submit to the Constitutional Council a request for a shared initiative referendum, or RIP. However, since that date, the Elders have validated only one request, which has never led to a referendum, for lack of having collected the more than 4.8 million signatures of citizens required. On Wednesday May 3, the Constitutional Council renders its decision concerning a request for RIP filed on April 13 by deputies from the left, aiming to reconsider the pension reform. A few weeks after a similar request was denied, is this second RIP more likely to succeed?
On March 20, in the wake of the adoption of the pension reform in the Assembly, 252 deputies from the left signed a request for RIP sent to the Constitutional Council. The text aimed to prevent the postponement of the legal retirement age beyond 62 years, while the reform provided for a departure at 64 years. On April 14, the Constitutional Council rejected this request.
A decision justified mainly by the fact that "on the date of registration of the referral, the bill aimed at affirming that the legal retirement age cannot be set beyond 62 years does not prevail no change in the rule of law". Indeed, the pension reform had not yet been enacted.
As of April 13, the parliamentary left filed a second request for RIP, in anticipation of the failure of the first. This, in addition to a first article similar to the previous request, includes a second article on the financing of pensions by increasing the CSG rate on certain incomes. The purpose of this second article: to propose a real "reform", as required by the Constitution to justify the holding of a RIP.
It should be noted, however, that the reason for the refusal of the first referendum on pensions remains valid: on April 13, when this second request was registered, the pension reform had still not been promulgated.
It therefore remains to be seen whether the Constitutional Council can validate the entire request based on the fact that the second article, relating to the financing of the pension system, constitutes a real reform, or whether it will sweep away the entire text on the pretext that the first article still makes "no change to the state of the law". Recall that in August 2021, the Elders had rejected in its entirety a request for RIP aimed at guaranteeing universal access to public hospitals, on the grounds that a single article of the text was not in conformity with the Constitution.
If, despite everything, the Constitutional Council validated this second request for RIP on pensions, a new stage would open in the procedure. The request should now gather the signatures of a tenth of the number of registered voters, or 4.88 million people, within nine months. The only RIP proposal validated by the Council since 2008, that opposing the privatization of Aéroports de Paris in 2019, has never achieved this difficult objective.
Consult our file: Pensions: the big bang
