Paris (AFP)
The deputies are looking from Tuesday evening on a 10th text devoted to the health crisis since March 2020, with the key to the controversial extension of the health pass until July 31, 2022.
The tool, hated by a minority of the population but used by a large majority of French people since the summer, is at the heart of this bill called "health vigilance".
The deputies will vote on the extension for eight months of the device, which will make it possible to span the presidential and legislative elections.
A choice that makes oppositions scream.
More than 380 amendments were tabled for this first reading, including a majority on the contentious article 2.
"It's going to be tense," predicts LR Philippe Gosselin.
"We cannot sit down on democracy", criticizes Pierre Dharréville, one of the spokespersons for the communist group.
Gérard Larcher, president of the Senate with a right-wing majority, has already announced that there was "no question of giving a blank check" to the executive for such a long and politically sensitive period.
The Constitutional Council should be seized by the oppositions if the bill does not evolve over the parliamentary shuttle, scheduled until early November.
In the street, the protest, which had met with some success in the middle of the summer, is running out of steam in this return.
More than 40,000 demonstrators were counted by the Interior Ministry on Saturday, 67,000 according to the militant collective Le Nombre Jaune.
In the hemicycle, the majority will have to keep an eye on its own troops.
Friday in the Laws Committee, the LREM deputy of Paris Pacôme Rupin, resolute opponent to the pass, seized the government project by narrowly passing an amendment which provides for limiting the use of the health pass geographically and according to the evolution of the epidemic.
A waiter checks a client's health pass at the entrance to a restaurant in Strasbourg, August 9, 2021 FREDERICK FLORIN AFP / Archives
But as expected, the LREM group will put the church back in the middle of the village through an amendment by Guillaume Gouffier-Cha.
This plans to return to the national logic of the pass, while taking into account several criteria that the "walkers" want to specify to justify the use of the pass: rate of vaccination, positivity of screening tests, incidence or of saturation of intensive care beds - with levels to be defined.
Proof that the majority group wants to play a slightly different music, while remaining in the tempo dictated by the government.
The Modem ally is on the same line.
- "The exceptional has become the norm" -
While a simple balance sheet report is scheduled for mid-February, the possibility of a debate in Parliament has also been enshrined in law.
But what form will it take?
Left and right are calling for a review clause much earlier.
The text examined against the background of the ebb of the epidemic must serve as any risk insurance for the executive which wants at all costs to spare itself, in the midst of the electoral campaign, a trial of unpreparedness in the event of a trend reversal.
It is a question of "avoiding at all costs a new wave" which would saturate hospitals in the middle of winter, said the Minister of Health Olivier Véran in front of the deputies.
The use of the pass until July 31, 2022, and also the possibility of declaring territorially a state of health emergency with its attendant restrictions, are presented as a "toolbox" in which the government will not necessarily be obliged to draw.
One way of trying to soften criticism of a state that has become "addicted" to emergency regimes.
"The exceptional has become the norm", summarizes the deputy Charles de Courson (Liberties and Territories) who recalls that over the last six years, between the attacks and the health crisis, the country has lived more than three years under the regime of different states of emergency.
The government plan also tightens the penalties for fraud with the health pass, up to five years' imprisonment and a fine of 75,000 euros.
According to a statement presented by Mr. Véran, as of October 14, 184 procedures had been opened for fraud and 35,634 false passes identified.
© 2021 AFP