imaginary tyrannies

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Macron has been accused of approving the pension reform on the sidelines of Parliament using a tyrannical device. Despite the difference in regime, the objectives that led France to introduce such a device -Article 49.3 of the Constitution- are similar to those that led Brazil to do the same in 1988, when the provisional measures were adopted.

He is part of the innovations that “rationalized” French parliamentarism, to steal the title from John Huber’s classic on the subject. The 1958 French Constitution was De Gaulle’s response to the ungovernability of the 4th Republic, in which the average duration of cabinets in the period was six months – there were 24 different cabinets under 16 prime ministers. And that was when the country was facing the Algerian crisis.

Article 49.3 authorizes recourse to the approval of the reform without a parliamentary vote in matters of finance and social security, but the government is automatically vulnerable to a motion of confidence: rejection implies dissolution of Parliament and consequent call for general elections (happened with Pompidou, in 1962). In other matters, the government can only do so once a year. In strategic terms, there is an inversion of the political burden involved: it is not the government that has to build a majority to approve them, but the opposition, to defeat it. It has been used 100 times, 28 times under a socialist prime minister. Read more (03/26/2023 – 20:45)

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