The Minister of Labor defended, in an interview with the JDD, the use of 49.3 of the Constitution to pass the pension reform without a vote. He believes that the government has “done everything” to avoid having to use it.
Two days after the government’s recourse to article 49.3 to have the pension reform adopted without a vote, the Minister of Labor Olivier Dussopt defends the use of this constitutional tool in an interview granted to the Sunday newspaper.
In this interview, the Minister of Labor believes that the government has “done everything, tried everything, until the last minute, to build this majority”. However, according to him, “this reform was too important to take the risk of playing Russian roulette” and “we were in a risk zone, with deputies who hesitated between abstention and voting against”.
49.3, “a heartbreaker”
For him, the government has “shown responsibility” and the use of 49.3 “is not an admission of failure, but it is heartbreaking”. “Until the last moment, we sought to avoid this 49-3. But we found that the guarantees were not sufficient for this text to be adopted. That being so, there will be a vote in the Assembly with the ‘examination of motions of censure’.
He regrets, however, that “the opposition, and first and foremost La France insoumise, prevented the National Assembly from debating and voting at first reading, with a massive obstruction of 20,000 amendments which, for the most part, had no neither head nor tail”.
But if he attacks LFI, Olivier Dussopt refuses to “point the finger at the LR party” despite not allowing the government to obtain a sufficient majority, believing that “it would be unfair”. “If there is responsibility, it is rather linked to a few individual breakaways”, he judges.
“There will be a before and an after”
As for the dialogue with the unions, the Minister of Labor readily acknowledges that “there will be a before and an after” the use of 49.3. However, he considers that “trust is not broken. Finally, Olivier Dussopt did not fail to deplore the violence that can arise from political debates against him. “When there is violence in words and Parliament, it is not surprising that there are also some in the street.
“The role of parliamentarians and political groups is to calm things down, not to play the blaster, to question the institutions and to bring street violence into Parliament”, he regretted in the pages of the JDD.
