At the head of the independent group Liot, the elected representative of the Meuse carries a bill to repeal the reform that makes the presidential camp tremble. The text is expected in committee on Wednesday and in the hemicycle on 8 June.

Bertrand Pancher and his colleague Charles de Courson continue to pound an "unfair" reform, led by a government that is now "illegitimate". And they recently showed their determination alongside the boss of the CGT Sophie Binet.

A composite gathering of centrists, socialist dissidents, ultra-marines and Corsican autonomists, their Liot group was already maneuvering to try to bring down the government by a motion of censure, rejected by nine votes on March 20.

"Populist attitude", "spendthrift coming-out": tense, the Macronists multiply the attacks against the "reversals" of Bertrand Pancher and Charles de Courson, and their bill "which has no chance of succeeding". They unearthed amendments from 2013, when the two centrists argued for raising the legal retirement age to 64.

The two deputies also voted Valérie Pécresse in the first round of the presidential election, while the right-wing candidate promised retirement at 65.

"Grotesque"

Their current position is "totally inconsistent" with their past. It's "grotesque", squeaks the president of the Renaissance group Aurore Bergé. The "opportunistic turns", "this can make our fellow citizens doubt the sincerity of a political commitment", adds Elisabeth Borne.

MP since 2007, Bertrand Pancher brushes off criticism. The former mayor of Bar-Le-Duc and former president of the General Council of the Meuse - he has devoted his life to politics - claims to "listen" to the French and the "defense of Parliament", rather than "the imprisonment of Emmanuel Macron".

The father of four says he took a clear stand against the pension reform during the legislative elections. And he talks about his farming parents who "started working early."

"My backbone is always the same," stresses the elected representative, who has worked for the UDF, the UMP, the UDI and the Radical Party: "a centrist Christian Democratic commitment", the defence of "ecology" and "territories".

His "friend" and former minister Jean-Louis Borloo inspires him, he says, by hailing the "miracle" of the 2007 Grenelle Environment Forum.

Bertrand Pancher arrives at Matignon, Paris on June 29, 2022 © JULIEN DE ROSA / AFP/Archives

At almost 65 years old, Bertrand Pancher would like to capitalize on the media exposure offered by the fight for pensions. With several colleagues from his parliamentary group, he launched an association with a political vocation: "Utile", to bring together the "humanists" in the field, all the "Girondins of the Republic".

"We will not be absent from the Europeans" of 2024, he promises, evoking "close contacts" with Jean Lassalle, the former shepherd deputy of the Pyrénées-Atlantiques, iconoclastic candidate for the 2017 and 2022 presidential elections.

In the National Assembly, Bertrand Pancher would even dream of a "new majority" of "coalition", associated with a government "from LR to the ecologists and socialists".

Did he take the big head? "Vanity of vanities, everything is vanity and pursuit of the wind", sweeps this "fairly convinced Catholic", who goes "once in two" to the "mass of parliamentarians" on Wednesday morning at Sainte-Clotilde, next to the Palais-Bourbon.

At Liot, his relatives praise his "great listening" and his "ability to hold the group" of 21 elected representatives, despite some tensions with colleagues of the UDI, on the center-right.

"We get along well, we work well," says Christophe Naegelen (UDI). But we "must remain balanced, not be in excess or arrogance," warns the deputy of the Vosges, who was against the motion of censure of March 20 but signed the proposal to repeal the pension reform.

Salt and pepper hair and face partially paralyzed by a serious fall when he was a child, Bertrand Pancher sometimes moves away from the tumult of politics for his other passion: giraffes, discovered thanks to a development project in Niger, in the Kouré reserve. "There is nothing more majestic than a giraffe eating acacia leaves," he said.

© 2023 AFP