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The French Constitutional Court has approved a large part of the highly contested pension reform wanted by the government and by President Emmanuel Macron, which was approved last March 16 without a parliamentary vote: some minor articles of the law were rejected by the Court due to some legal problems , but the most substantial and important part of the law has been judged legitimate for the French Constitution, including the central measure of the provision which provides for the raising of the retirement age from 62 to 64 years.
The Court also rejected a popular referendum request to keep the retirement age at 62, which had been presented by some left-wing parliamentary groups. On May 3, however, he will have to express himself again on another request for a similar referendum, always presented by the same parliamentary groups but more detailed and better motivated, according to the statements of some of the politicians involved. The French constitution provides that a popular referendum cannot repeal a law that has been in force for less than a year, but these requests were made before the pension reform came into force.
The reform has been strongly criticized for months by opposition parties, ranging from the radical left of Jean-Luc Mélenchon to the extreme right of Marine Le Pen, and by a very large part of public opinion: twelve days have been organized since the beginning of January of huge protests and strikes across the country. There were also large demonstrations today, the day on which the Court’s decision was expected, which intensified immediately after the news spread, shortly after 6 pm.
The decision of the Constitutional Court officially closes the institutional path of the reform, but the opposition leaders have already announced that they will not give up new attempts to block it: Mélenchon he wrote on Twitter that «the struggle continues», Le Pen he said that the political fate of the reform “is not sealed” and that “the people always have the last word”. Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne, who was together with Macron the main supporter of the need for reform, commented on the decision with a rather humble acknowledgment: “Tonight there are neither winners nor losers”.
The request for examination by the Constitutional Court had come from the opposition parties: even if French analysts considered it very unlikely that the reform would be judged unconstitutional, the maneuver nevertheless lengthened the time required for the law to be approved and provoked new protests, increasing pressure already very high on the government.
The government assumed almost entirely the responsibility for this reform when it decided to approve it without going through the vote of the National Assembly, the more important of the two branches of the French parliament, taking advantage of an exception contained in the Constitution: Borne and Macron had decided to resort to paragraph 3 of article 49, which allows a prime minister or a prime minister (Borne, in this case) to approve a text of law on finance or welfare financing without going through a parliamentary vote (but with the approval by the Council of Ministers). This choice had become necessary because the majority that supported the provision was extremely narrow, also due to the large popular protests that had convinced several parliamentarians to change their minds.
The pension reform wanted by Macron provides for an increase in the retirement age from 62 to 64, an increase in minimum pensions and the abolition of a whole series of exceptional measures which allowed some categories of workers to retire earlier. Discussions for a reform of the pension system in France had already begun in 2019, and even then there had been large and participate protests. In general, Macron is not the first president to want to reform the pension system, considered by various analysts to be excessively complicated, inefficient, costly and unfair.
– Read also: The French government’s proposal to reform pensions