After France’s Constitutional Council on Friday approved nearly all of President Emmanuel Macron’s legislation to reform the pensions system, notably the raising of the retirement age on full pension rights to 64, the legislation was enacted as law in the early hours of Saturday. In this op-ed analysis of the move, Mediapart’s political affairs correspondent Ellen Salvi sets out why the social and political crisis created by the fiercely contested reform has now also become an institutional one, paving a path in France for future illiberal regimes.
Protest marches against President Emmanuel Macron's pensions system reforms were held across France on Thursday, with turnout ranging between 380,000 and 1.5 million according to the conflicting accounts of police and trades unions, ahead of a crucial ruling by France's Constitutional Council due on Friday on the legality of the legislation and opposition demands for a referendum over the issue.
In a ruling announced on Thursday, France's Constitutional Council has approved government plans to introduce further restrictions over the Covid-19 epidemic, including the requirement that people display a vaccination or negative test 'health pass' before entering public venues, and the obligation for healthcare staff to be fully vaccinated.
Constitutional Council said that MPs who passed the controversial legislation had not set out clearly enough what would constitute a breach of the law in such situations.
In a definitive ruling, France’s Constitutional Council has thrown out legislation adopted by parliament late last month which imposed restrictions on the movement of prisoners released after serving sentences for terrorism-related offences. The ruling by the Council, which found the law to be unconstitutional for its infringement of fundamental freedoms, represents a significant blow for both President Emmanuel Macron’s governing LREM party, and in particular for justice minister Éric Dupond-Moretti, a high-profile defence lawyer until his appointment in early July.
To ensure that citizens complied with the Coronavirus lockdown introduced on March 17th 2020, the French government drew up legislation to make breaches of the rules a criminal offence. But lawyers and academics have raised concerns as to whether part of that legislation – which can lead to jail for anyone who breaches the rules more than three times in a month – is constitutional. France's top constitutional authority, the Conseil Constitutionnel or Constitutional Council, is due to rule on the issue in June. Meanwhile there have been more than 1,500 criminal cases involving repeat offenders and a number of people have already been jailed. Camille Polloni reports.
Last week the French authorities banned a planned march in Paris by trade unions opposed to labour law reforms, before eventually backing down partially and allowing a more limited demonstration. Here Mediapart's editor-in-chief Edwy Plenel argues that demonstrating is a constitutional right and that, by banning the march that the trade unions wanted, the government violated the fundamental law that guarantees all our freedoms. It is, he writes, our duty to resist this unlawful act in order to defend our common ideal: democracy.
French is enshrined in the constitution as France's only official language. President François Hollande is now planning to change the law so the country can ratify the European charter on regional languages – of which France has 75. But as Lénaïg Bredoux reports, this modest step highlights just how few other constitutional reforms the socialist president has introduced since his election.
The French government’s proposed top 75% income tax rate, applicable to individuals annually earning more than 1 million euros, was struck down by the country’s Constitutional Council last weekend after it ruled that it breached a fundamental principle of equality for taxpayers. This was the application of income tax per individual instead of the usual method of per household. How could the government, now accused of amateurism, and especially the budget and finance ministries, have ignored a technicality to which they had been previously alerted by the parliamentary finance commission? While President François Hollande has promised to redraft the terms of the tax, there is every indication that, if it is revived, it will return severely watered-down. Mediapart business and finance specialist Martine Orange analyses a fiasco that begs the question of whether the tax was scuppered from the inside.
Ruling means socialist government must re-think the terms of its new 75% top income tax rate, currently applicable to individuals rather than households.
