Paris (AFP)

As usual before a presidential election, parliamentary work will stop between the end of February and March 2022. Many laws are still far from final adoption, not to mention possible last-minute reforms.

Here are the main perspectives.

- Projects on the right track

Started in the fall of 2019 and delayed due to the health crisis, the bioethics bill and its flagship measure to open up assisted reproduction to all women must ultimately be voted on in the Assembly on June 29.

The climate and resilience bill, at first reading in the Senate from Monday, must be definitively validated at the end of 2021. Its constitutional component, to include the climate in the Basic Law via a referendum, is not as good as possible because of a disagreement between the Assembly and the Senate with a right-wing majority.

Wanted as a regal "marker" of the Macron five-year term, the text against "separatism" is on track, with a new reading in the Assembly scheduled from June 28.

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The draft new anti-terrorism and intelligence law, under an accelerated procedure like almost all government texts, must be definitively approved by the end of July.

The bill for confidence in justice, carried by Eric Dupond-Moretti and focused on the criminal, was validated at first reading by the Assembly and could be on the menu of the Senate in September.

Emmanuel Macron, however, has just announced the Estates General of justice at the start of the school year, after several controversies over the state of justice fueled by the right and the police unions.

A bill on criminal irresponsibility, after the Sarah Halimi case, has also been announced.

The 4D bill on decentralization, one of the last legislative projects, will start in the Senate in July, and will pass to the Assembly at the start of the school year.

In the fall, the agenda will be almost monopolized by the long budget sequence (finance bill for 2022, Social Security budget bill).

Already this summer, Parliament must give the green light to an amending budget for 2021, in order to support the end of the health crisis.

- More uncertain bills

The legislative time available to the majority is very short.

The LREM group intends to have its bill adopted as a priority by the end of its mandate for "real economic and professional equality" between women and men, voted once in May, as well as that intended to better promote volunteer firefighters and experiment with a unique emergency call number which has just been read for the first time.

Another text pushed by the majority, that against animal abuse was voted once in the Assembly and must now pass to the Senate.

The government is also committed to getting approval by the end of the five-year term of Monique Limon's law proposal (LREM) which should facilitate the adoption of children.

Another subject that is close to heart in the LREM ranks, the bill on the extension of the legal period of abortion, which was initiated by Albane Gaillot (not registered) should find its translation in the next budget of the Social Security.

Other bills have been passed for the first time and run the risk of remaining at the quayside, such as the one on the governance of sports federations.

The bill proposed by Grégory Besson-Moreau (LREM), known as Egalim 2, aimed at "preserving" the remuneration of farmers, is just beginning its parliamentary course.

- The shadow of pensions

Emmanuel Macron has put the very sensitive pension reform back into the debate, even if he said that it could not "be taken up as it is".

The bill for a "universal system" of pensions had been brought to a halt by the Covid crisis, after its adoption by forceps at first reading in the Assembly, in early March 2020, by resorting to 49.3.

Uncertainty remains on a possible reform, and its articulation to a bill on dependency, within a very constrained parliamentary calendar.

© 2021 AFP