With a break in September, the Assembly wants time to parley

If the deputies and senators complete their work within the allotted time, that is to say on August 7, they will take a well-deserved vacation. Especially the former, after the intense campaign for the legislative elections and the installation with a bang of the new National Assembly.

This year, the government has decided to grant them a small extension, by not convening Parliament for an extraordinary session in September. An institutional practice used for twenty years by all governments to implement increasingly bloated reform agendas. The parliamentarians will therefore return to the hemicycles for the ordinary session, from October 3.

This freed time should be used to experiment “the new method of compromise and dialogue with Parliament desired by the President and the Prime Minister”, justified Franck Riester, Minister Delegate for Relations with Parliament, Tuesday, July 26, on Twitter. Before adding: « We want to give all the time necessary for consultation with parliamentarians and the French on the texts for the start of the school year ». The first to be considered in the National Assembly will relate to the extension of the unemployment insurance rules which expire on October 31, while the Senate will seize a bill on immigration.

This change in approach meets the demands of parliamentarians, starting with the President of the National Assembly, Yaël Braun-Pivet, who advocated, in The Parisian July 24, “taking the time for discussion, negotiation and consultation”or even « co-construction » legislative. A word already advocated by Jean-François Copé, when he chaired the group of UMP deputies between 2007 and 2010, to revalue the function of deputy in the face of « the hyper-presidency » by Nicolas Sarkozy.

In the absence of an absolute majority for the macronists, Yaël Braun-Pivet calls for more dialogue with the government on the parliamentary agenda, as well as the establishment of contact groups, with one deputy per group, in order to better anticipate bills, work on them upstream, sometimes even before they go to the Council of Ministers. Precocity in temporality, sobriety in quality: the executive will have to curb its legislative bulimia, with fewer, shorter and more mature texts with the oppositions.