It is an extremely severe judgment issued by the Council of State against the pension reform. The institution responsible for advising the government during the preparation of bills considers, in a notice published Friday, January 24, not to have had the time to "guarantee legal certainty as best as possible" of the pension reform, deplores the " incomplete financial projections "of the government and a recourse to orders which" makes lose the overall visibility ".

Seized on January 3, the Council of State had only three weeks to give its opinion on the two draft laws (organic and ordinary), which the government also modified six times during this period, which "did not put him in a position to carry out his mission with the serenity and the time required for reflection to best guarantee the legal certainty of the examination which he carried out," he believes.

A "situation all the more regrettable" that it is a reform "unprecedented since 1945 and intended to transform for decades to come (...) one of the major components of the social contract", adds the highest French administrative jurisdiction, in this document published on the Légifrance site.

>> To read: Pension reform: on a hard strike, the lawyers of the 93 faced with difficult choices

A scathing opinion, which spares the impact study accompanying the two texts: the first version was "insufficient" and, even when completed, "the financial projections remain incomplete", in particular on the increase in retirement age, employment rate of seniors, unemployment insurance expenses and those related to social minima.

The Council of State also points out the choice to resort to 29 ordinances, including "for the definition of structuring elements of the new pension system", which "makes lose the overall visibility which is necessary for the appreciation of the consequences of the reform and, therefore, of its constitutionality and its conventionality ".

That relating to the "100% conservation of the rights constituted" at the time of the switch between the current system and the future "universal system" is considered "particularly crucial", to such an extent "that in the absence of such a ordinance "the reform" will not apply "to people born from 1975.

Arguments for opponents of the reform

Finally, the commitment to revalue teachers and researchers via programming laws is doomed to disappear from the text because "these provisions constitute an injunction for the government to table a bill and are thus contrary to the Constitution".

"They were nevertheless able to validate almost all of the two texts that were proposed to them and they made recommendations to the government that the government intends", reacted Saturday Laurent Pietraszewski, secretary of state in charge of Pensions, on France 3 Nord-Pas-de-Calais.

>> See: Teachers, lawyers, nurses ... the "happenings" of anger

But throughout the weekend, this opinion mainly offered weighty arguments to opponents of the reform. "On form and substance, the Council of State fully confirms what we have expressed from the start. There is a real problem with the legal consistency of the text," reacted Saturday to AFP François Hommeril, the president of CFE-CGC.

The same criticism of Europe 1 from Yves Veyrier, the secretary general of Force Ouvrière, for whom "the government has absolutely no control over its subject". "The Council of State dismantles the communication device of the 'one euro will give the same rights' and of the system supposed to be simpler, underlining the complexity and the diversity of the rules of contribution and opening of rights," wrote the day before his union in a press release.

"It means 'this reform project is neither done nor to do'"

"Honestly, I have rarely read such a negative opinion," writes on her Facebook account Valérie Rabault, the president of the Socialist deputies. For Olivier Faure, first secretary of the PS, "we are stunned by the level of amateurism and improvisation of the government for such a crucial reform".

On his blog, Jean-Luc Mélenchon selected a "best-of" of pieces chosen in the opinion of the Council of State, which "snapped like slaps". This opinion "guns the pension law", according to the leader of France rebellious.

>> Read: Pension reform: the true-false withdrawal from the pivotal age

Sébastien Jumel, PCF deputy, evokes a "tackle" to Emmanuel Macron's project, a "botched reform targeting a base of our Republic".

For Julien Aubert, deputy Les Républicains, "in polite terms, that means 'this reform project is neither done nor to do'". "When you take the Council of State casually and the National Assembly is treated as a negligible quantity, it gives an incoherent and poorly crafted text".

With AFP

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