Hi guys! Just a little life update today. I bought a pineapple, it was warm enough to go without my jacket, and the Prime Minister bypassed the National Assembly to force through a deeply unpopular reform bill, thus potentially triggering the collapse of the French government.
How’s it hanging in the States? Not great? Same here!
So here’s what little ol’ me knows so far: 90% of French workers and 70% of French citizens overall do not want the age of retirement to be raised from 62 to 64. If it were put to a popular vote, it would be shut down expeditiously. This reform is the flagship of President Macron’s administration — it’s like what the New Deal was the Roosevelt, except it sucks and everyone hates it.
France’s government has both a president and a prime minister, which is actually pretty common globally. President Macron realized early this morning that he did not have the votes in the National Assembly to get his reform bill through, so he instructed the Prime Minister, a woman under his command named Elizabeth Borne, to pass the bill without taking a vote.
You might be thinking, that’s cuckoo bananas that the president can just force legislation that literally nobody, on the left or the right, wants to vote for. And it is! He’s allowed to do it because of Article 49.3, a provisional article included in the 1953 version of the French Constitution. France rewrites their Constitution frequently — in fact, since the Revolution, there have been five different governments formed. By comparison, the States has only ever had one, the same one we started with in 1776.
Article 49.3 is meant to overcome deadlock, and it’s been used several times since its inception (87 times, actually). But right now, people are heated. When Article 49.3 is triggered, legislators have 24 hours to submit a vote of no confidence in the government. If they get a simple majority in the National Assembly on this vote, the government is required to resign. The equivalent would be if the US president was forced to resign, along with his entire cabinet, his vice president, and the Speaker of the House.
There’s a reason they call 49.3 “l’option nucléaire.”
One more thing: Macron made the move to trigger 49.3 just minutes before the vote was to begin. So every député (senator) was in the building and seated when they got word that they would not, in fact, be voting. That’s a serious bonehead move on Macron’s part, because now he has a room of 400 bloodthirsty politicians uniting in their desire to see his head on a pike. They’re still there, at time of writing, but they won’t be for long. Politicians on the left and the right, at the national level and the local, will be encouraging and participating in protests very soon.
We may not get a sixth government out of this. It’s a possibility, but a pretty distant one. A much more likely scenario is an emergency election so that there’s at least somebody at the steering wheel. Macron miiiiiiight just be able to hold on to power, but I wouldn’t count on it. Macron’s party still holds a razor-thin majority in the Assembly, but the smallest breeze could knock that over. Like most things in politics, the most interesting and important parts of all this probably won’t resolve for several more months or even years.
But who am I? What do I know? I’m just an American immigrant blogger, currently scrolling through videos of effigies of Macron being burned in various French cities.
Hope all is well back home. Heard a bank collapsed. Good luck with that.
Bises,
Allison
P.S.: The garbage collectors of Paris are on strike about retirement reform, and from what I hear, the trash is piling up over people’s heads, and the stench is inescapable. Vive la France.
Flan in France 