End of the five-year term: should the reforms be resumed?

Defense Council, Council of Ministers and government seminar, this Wednesday promises to be of rare intensity.

With, on the menu, two questions that will determine the rest of the five-year term.

The first question is obviously the one on whether or not to toughen health measures in the face of the reactivated threat of Covid.

With a fundamental alternative: knowing that, to date, the situation in our country is rather better than that of our neighbors, should we take the opportunity to harden the system in the hope of breaking for good the dynamics of the epidemic, or at on the contrary, continue to manage the curfew from day to day?

This is for the short term.

The other subject on the menu of all these meetings is the long term?

And this question, here it is: should we resume the reforms, in particular those which had been left in limbo during the first confinement, pensions and unemployment insurance?

Or should we just continue with the recovery plan and try to limit the devastating effects of the economic and social crisis caused by Covid?

And there, there is a real divide within the majority.

There are those who point out that the reform program is already well supplied, and that the parliamentary calendar hardly leaves a second to accommodate other subjects.

The following are in fact already underway (or will soon be): the comprehensive security law, the provisions on the fight against communitarianism, the (even distant) referendum project and the climate bill, not to mention the idea cherished by Emmanuel Macron to reintroduce proportionality in the next legislative elections.

With, in the middle of all this, the management of the plan to support the economy and the affected sectors.

We are not far from the overflow.

This is the thesis defended by part of the majority, and more especially by Richard Ferrand, the President of the Assembly or by François Bayrou who say that, stop, the French need to breathe, that we must not add.

And who is there in front of them?

On the contrary, those who want to resume reforms.

This is the position of Bruno Le Maire, which pushes to relaunch the pension reform, it is also apparently the position of Alexis Kohler, the closest collaborator of Emmanuel Macron, and of all those who plead to rediscover the reforming spirit of the beginning of the quinquennium.

Their argument is that a reform like that of pensions will be necessary no matter what, if only because of the level of debt reached by the country.

It's simple, we won't be able for long, in addition to our Covid debt, to widen the pension deficit every year.

And how to relaunch the file?

Because it's still quite socially risky?

It is true.

But it can be prepared, by targeting next summer (if the epidemic is then under control).

It will be high time to prepare the rest, that is to say the presidential election of 2022. And to speak again to the right, to this part of the electorate of Macron that his current gropings on the regal and the security do not have so far not really convinced.