The legislative initiative presented by the left against Élisabeth Borne fails in the National Assembly by obtaining only 146 votes of the 289 that were necessary
French Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne has comfortably overcome this Monday the motion of censure that the union of leftist parties had presented against her and against her government. The National Assembly clearly rejected the initiative promoted by the New Popular Ecologist and Social Union (Nupes) coalition, which only received 146 supports. They voted in favour, apart from the Nupes deputies, the electoral alliance of La Francia Insumisa, the Socialist Party, Europe Ecology-The Greens (EE-LV) and the Communist Party.
In order for the motion of censure to have been approved, 289 deputies of the 577 in the National Assembly needed to support it, which would have caused the fall of the Borne government. The left-wing parliamentarians wanted to denounce that the prime minister, handpicked by the president, Emmanuel Macron, last May, did not request a vote of confidence from the representatives of the Chamber after her declaration of general policy last week before the National Assembly . Still, she wasn’t forced to.
“You are a democratic anomaly,” Mathilde Panot, head of the parliamentary group of La Francia Insumisa, snapped at Borne during the parliamentary debate prior to the vote. Likewise, she warned that those who did not support the motion of censure would be considered “supporters of the Government.”
If the National Assembly had approved the motion, the Prime Minister would have had to present the resignation of her Government to the President of the Republic. Borne, on the other hand, made fun of the legislative initiative of the left, which he described as a “position motion”, since from the beginning Nupes knew that it was not going to prosper because they did not have enough support to make it go ahead. Without the votes of The Republicans (62 deputies) and Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (89 seats), it was impossible.
“Third Failure”
The extreme right, in the midst of a campaign to present itself to public opinion as a respectable and constructive opposition, has not wanted to support the plan led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s far-left France Insumisa party. In this regard, the spokesman for the French Government, Olivier Verán, stressed that yesterday’s is the “third consecutive failure of Mélenchon: the presidential elections, the legislative elections and this form of internal scrutiny of a motion of censure.”
A motion of censure is the only means available to the National Assembly to force the resignation of the Prime Minister and his Government in France. In order to present it, the support of at least 58 deputies is needed. However, they almost never prosper. In fact, in the Fifth Republic, only once has a legislative initiative of this type caused the fall of the French Executive. It happened in 1962, against the cabinet of George Pompidou.
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