As expected, France’s Constitutional Council on Friday validated almost all of Emmanuel Macron’s reform of the country’s pensions system, which notably includes raising, for most of the population, the age of retirement on full pension rights from 62 to 64, and which has been fiercely opposed in three months of mass, nationwide street protests.
The legislation was immediately promulgated overnight, enacted as law with its publication on Saturday in the official French gazette of notices of laws and decrees, the Journal official.
Just six minor parts of the reform bill, which the government forced through Parliament without a vote using a constitutional clause, were thrown out by the council. It also dismissed an application made in March by leftwing opposition parties for a national referendum over a proposal to maintain the retirement age at 62. A second, more detailed request for a referendum on the issue has been handed to the council, which will announce its ruling on that on May 3rd.
The mission of the council, made up of nine members nominated in equal groups of three by the president and the speakers of the upper and lower houses of Parliament, is to decide whether laws which are submitted for its scrutiny comply with the constitution, and also to rule on the legality of elections and referendums.
On Friday evening, French labour minister Olivier Dussopt took to Twitter to announce his satisfaction at the Constitutional Council’s ruling, declaring that it marked the end of “a legislative and democratic” process, and that his ministerial staff and those of the national pensions fund were “fully mobilised to put the reform in place for September 1st”.
Others among Macron’s camp hailed “the end” of the matter, what Dussopt described as a “democratic” legislative process, which is to pretend that a democracy cannot function properly when its social character is overlooked. It is this social democracy which the government and the Constitutional Council’s nine “wise men”, as its members are widely dubbed, finished off on April 14th.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
In its ruling, the Constitutional Council underlined that its mission was to verify the reform legislation’s “compliance with the Constitution” and was “not to settle all the debates that the pensions reform can give rise to”. In what was notably a reference to the use of article 49.3 of the French constitution, a clause which allowed the government to push its bill through parliament without a vote, the council recognised that the course of the reform, which began in Parliament in January, was of “an unusual character”, but that this did not “render the legislative procedure contrary to the Constitution”. While the council’s ruling put an official end to the arguments over the legality of the legislation, it did not for as much end the question of its legitimacy.
Just minutes after the council’s decision was announced at the end of the afternoon on Friday, the trades union alliance - l’intersyndicale – which has been leading the nationwide protest demonstrations against the reform, issued a statement calling on supporters to make May 1st, Labour Day, “an exceptional day of popular mobilisation against the pensions reform and for social justice”. It repeated its “solemn” demand that the French president should not promulgate the reform. It said that was “the only way of calming the anger that is expressed in the country”, adding that no trades union officials would meet with Macron or members of his government if “the withdrawal of the reform” was not up for discussion.
It was of no surprise that Macron decided otherwise, and went ahead with the promulgation – he had a legal time limit of 15 days to do so – with its publication in the Journal officiel on Saturday. According to article 10 of the French constitution, he had the power to send the legislation, in whole or in part, back to Parliament for review, as indeed Laurent Berger, the leader of the CFDT union, the largest in France, had called for. But this was an option that was not even envisaged.
Despite the will of opponents of the legislation to continue with the protests (which have included 12 separate nationwide days of action), the executive believes it is able to bring the matter to a close, ending what resembles yet another sequence of a Netflix series that has been playing out at the Élysée Palace over the past six years, and in which the trade unions and millions of workers mobilised over recent weeks have been given the role of extras.
In ministerial corridors, rumours abound over the manner in which Macron intends to regain authority. There is talk of a government reshuffle, the introduction of new legislative priorities, and reaching political compromises with ones and others. But none of that will sooth the anger that can be felt almost everywhere in France, where the far-right, which came second to Macron in the last two presidential elections, has never been so strong.
The last of the safeguards collapse
The confidence of the president that he can calmly see through his second and final term in office amid such a social, political and institutional crisis is the stuff of mystery. With no absolute majority in the National Assembly, the lower and most powerful house of Parliament, isolated in the presidential palace and obliged to use force to subdue aspirations among the population, Macron hangs on to his policies in favour of the wealthiest, and with no regard for the emergency of climate change, and without ever reflecting about the little social cohesion that exists in the country, which he appears to want to sweep up with zeal.
By making the Constitutional Council the arbiter of his own political erring, he drags France’s institutions, already strongly disparaged, along in his wake. The Fifth Republic had run out of steam. It is now republican in only its varnish. As Dominique Rousseau, an expert and lecturer on French constitutional law, explained in a recent interview with French daily Le Monde, the Constitutional Council had been given an opportunity to show its “independence” by fulfilling “wholeheartedly its role as a guardian of the proper functioning of the parliamentary procedure and debate”.
But instead of that, the Constitutional Council preferred to engage its artificial and anachronistic character, confirming its profile as the ultimate judicial recourse for a prince and his court to which its members owe their nomination, far from the role given to supreme courts in neighbouring democracies. France’s republican “monarchs” wallow in the absolute powers of the Old Regime while other countries, including ones with monarchies, have developed parliamentary practices that are far more respectful of citizens.
When all is said and done, the so-called “wise men” – wise in name only – have created a dangerous precedent. They have come to a decision that is as brutal as it is technical, and to which all those who govern and who want to twist constitutional principles, to bypass the rights of Parliament and ride roughshod over the separation of powers, can refer back to. The last safeguards have disappeared, and the path is now paved for illiberal regimes. If ever the far-right should come to power, it would be able to claim with sincerity that it governs in continuity with institutional practices, combining a contempt for parliament, the annihilation of social democracy, and police repression of protest movements.
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- The original French version of this op-ed article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse