The “parliamentary coup” and the deeper legitimacy crisis based on Article 49.3 is anyway one of the most authoritarian and anti-democratic aspects of the French constitution and a legacy of a notion that in the end the government should be able to make decisions, even if it does not have majority.
According to this provision, the government can invoke this article and pass a law without it going through a vote in Parliament. The opposition does not have the possibility to oppose this decision, except to proceed with a motion of no confidence. If the government loses the relevant vote then it is considered that the law was also voted against.
This procedure has been used several times by the French governments because it loosens their hands in cases where they fear that a piece of legislation will not have a majority in the National Assembly.
Governments resort to this means mainly when they know that they will not lose after the confidence of the Parliament.
A handy authoritarian tool
Historically, this measure has been used 100 times during the Fifth Republic. The champion is Michel Rocard, who as prime minister in the period 1988-1991 invoked this article of the constitution 28 times.
But so far the silver medal goes to Elisabeth Bourne, Macron’s choice for French Prime Minister from the parliamentary elections of 2022 who, without even completing a year as Prime Minister, has already used this measure 10 times.
The political calculation of the Macron wing is that the Republicans, as they have already stated, will not vote in favor of the motion of no confidence that is expected to be tabled, and so the Bourne government, a minority government, will remain in place.
But the real problem is that France is not only facing an impressive social movement around insurance. But also that he is facing a deep legitimacy crisis, which reflects precisely the fact that neither Macron formed a truly majority dynamic around his re-election, nor did his party manage to have the momentum that would correspond to a party that can pass major reforms.
Resorting to authoritarian practices effectively “makes up” for this lack of legitimacy. But it risks further deepening the political crisis as ever larger sections of society will view the political system as hostile.
The very fact that the protests against insurance reform continue, despite the formal reception of the legislative process, and the strong signs of anger and mood of mobilization recorded in society and the public sphere, indicate that the rift is deeper and will not close easily .
In France, the insurance-pension system essentially functions as a metonym for what we would call the “social state” and overall for the social contract that was formed over decades. This also explains the magnitude of the reactions. And if it seems to us that the reform is not so “aggressive” in relation to our own insurance, it is good to remember that Greece also needed the “state of exception” of the Memoranda in order to pass the big cuts to social insurance.
A deeper political crisis that does not only concern France
In any case, we have entered a new historical cycle, which includes not only more intense crisis tendencies – the constant appearance of “weak links” in the international banking system can only be interpreted as a harbinger of a more comprehensive turning point – but also a strong return of the “street “, that is, of mass social mobilizations. There is an accumulated delegitimization of dominant policies, which comes to meet the strategic embarrassment of what we used to describe as the “neoliberal consensus”, which sometimes takes the form of anger and resentment and fuels social conflicts even in the form of large mobilizations.
Faced with this condition, governments that consider themselves to represent the political “mainstream” have a real difficulty in extracting consent. Even if they try to speak a more democratic language or a rhetoric that admits that there is a mistrust on the part of the citizens, when the time comes they choose to position themselves with the logic of the state that is hostile to the citizens. One such case is the case of Emmanuel Macron who claimed to be a somewhat “transcendent” Center, but never managed to form a majority dynamic around the policy, hence the rather authoritarian policy at various times.
So far someone like Macron can still ask for or even extort support, arguing that otherwise “outside” political forces might come in, and especially in France the way different sections of the popular strata are polarized towards the Left and otherwise towards the Far Right, not allowing the formation of a majority dynamic of those who feel wronged by current policies.
However, this does not negate the possibility that these mass mobilizations will act as a catalyst for new forms of unity of the popular strata that will shape new political dynamics, even though the issue of political “translation” always has its own uncertainty.
