the limits of parliamentary revival

HAShen Parliament closes its doors for the summer holidays, the various actors who moderated the session all have good reason to rejoice. Although outvoted on several occasions, the government managed to get the three main texts it had presented voted on, without straying too far from their original version. The right, which had come close to disqualification after Valérie Pécresse’s score in the presidential election (4.78% of the votes cast), demonstrated its usefulness by fiercely negotiating its support for the executive; the extreme right, in search of notabilisation, has invested without making too many waves in some of the key bodies of the National Assembly (vice-presidency, parliamentary intelligence delegation) ; the New People’s Ecological and Social Union (Nupes) has established itself without breaking radical opposition to Emmanuel Macron. At the opening of the 16^e legislature, no one gave much of the outcome of this strong comeback of Parliament imposed by the result of the June legislative elections. Everyone quickly found their marks.

If the actors are satisfied, the observers are struck by two facts: the first, positive, is the revitalization of the political debate, in a Hemicycle which has the advantage of representing, much better than in recent years, the different sensitivities that run through French society. The risk of a break between the national representation and the real country is thus minimized.

The second, more problematic fact, however, qualifies the first: parliamentarians and the government alike emerged exhausted from this month of debates punctuated by innumerable adjournments and sleepless nights. If the oppositions have obtained the satisfaction of perpetually putting the executive in the breach and breaking the verticality of the previous mandate, the modifications they have obtained are not worth the time spent or the energy deployed to defend them. .

The great absentee from the debates

What do the French expect from their representatives? Whether they stage their differences to better exorcise them, or whether they act effectively in the face of the unprecedented number of problems that will arise at the start of the school year: risk of electricity shortage, threat of recession, obvious acceleration of global warming which obliges us to reconsider from top to bottom the essence of our behavior? To this question, each group will have to answer in the most realistic way possible, otherwise the proclaimed renewal of Parliament will only be a flash in the pan.

It is disturbing to note that the environmental question has been systematically underestimated in the debates, when all the signals were there, from the rise in fuel prices to the scorching summer, to remind everyone that it is essential like absolute urgency.

Presented as a victory snatched by the deputies, the abandonment of the extraordinary session of September, which had been considered for a time by the government to speed up decisions on the development of renewable energies and the reform of the labor market, does not will really be one only if this time is used to forge essential compromises upstream. Otherwise, the National Assembly runs the risk of becoming the place where time stands still. It will discredit itself and again become marginalized.

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