A French parliamentary commission ended its examination of the government’s contested pension reform bill on Wednesday evening without having reached the end of the text because of thousands of proposed amendments. The original text is to be debated in the full chamber starting Monday.
The members of the Social Affairs commission had been meeting since Monday morning to examine the government’s proposed pension reform and the 7,000 amendments proposed by the opposition.
By Wednesday evening's deadline, they had gone through two articles and not reached article 7, the key part of the reform, that proposes raising the minimum retirement age from 62 to 64 years old.
A few minutes before the 8 pm deadline, with 4,997 amendments left, commission president Fadila Khattabi, of President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, ended the session with “regret” that most of the text had not been examined, despite 28 hours of debate.
The debates stagnated around the "senior index", which would require companies to publish their number of elderly employees, and the system of financing pensions. Both were the target of many amendments introduced by the left-green opposition Nupes alliance, which is determined to block the reform.
The Nupes proposals to find other resources, including re-instating the wealth tax or increased taxes on investments, were rejected.
The commission did approve the creation of the senior index, which the opposition dismissed as ineffective. It also approved the first article, which would eliminate most special pension schemes, including those for Paris metro workers, electricity and gas workers and the French central bank.
Parliamentary debate
Because the government introduced the legislation via a social security spending bill, the original text will be debated by the entire National Assembly on Monday, without any amendments adopted by the commission.
The three weeks of debates will start with a motion from the Nupes to reject the entire bill and a motion to put the reform to a referendum, supported by the far-right National Rally – measures that are expected to be rejected in the chamber.
In order to get the bill passed, Renaissance, which does not have a majority, will depend on votes from other parties, likely the centre-right Republicains.
(with wires)
