The parliamentary session ran out of time. After nearly three weeks of review and more than sixty hours of debate, the members of parliament saw the discussions on the social security financing bill interrupted in the early hours of Thursday morning due to time constraints. Article 47.1 of the Constitution imposes a strict deadline, and this deadline was set to expire at midnight.
A left-wing opposition to the end of the session
Most of the amendments could not be examined in time, despite a series of measures already passed, including the suspension of the pension reform. Late in the evening, left-wing groups repeatedly raised points of order to demand an extension of the session, to no avail. The Minister for Relations with Parliament, Laurent Panifous, reminded the Senate that the constitutional framework prohibited encroaching on the time allotted to the Senate, under penalty of rendering the procedure irregular. The government therefore decided, as provided for by the Constitution, to transmit to the Senate the initial text adopted by the Council of Ministers, enriched by the amendments accepted by the National Assembly, but without a final vote by the deputies. This decision was immediately contested by the left-wing opposition, which denounced the truncated debate.
A dense but incomplete legislative effort
In total, more than 1600 amendments were tabled. The National Assembly examined a significant portion of them, but not enough to finalize the text on time. Laurent Panifous emphasized the scale of the work accomplished, noting that the volume of debate was almost twice that of the previous year. The text, now in the hands of the Senate, will be studied in committee at the end of the week before being debated in plenary session. This step opens a new phase of the parliamentary process, in a context where the presidential majority is counting on the upper house to rebalance or amend sensitive provisions. The sequence concludes with a sense of frustration in the chamber, where some members felt they had been deprived of essential debate time. The government, for its part, accepts the forced passage through the Senate, arguing that the procedure is enshrined in the Constitution and that the budgetary timetable cannot be postponed.
