Will there be a referendum in 2025? No one has the answer as of the start of this year, but no French president will have brandished this prospect as much as Emmanuel Macron, without ever taking action. Since July 3, 2017, in front of both Houses of Parliament gathered in Versailles – “If necessary, I will resort to the vote of our fellow citizens by way of a referendum,” he said, even though he had a large majority in the Assemblée Nationale – to his December 31, 2024, New Year’s address – in 2025, “I will ask you to decide on certain decisive issues” – Macron has repeatedly thought of using this form of a “return to the people,” seldom used in the last 20 years.
He toyed with the idea of extricating himself from the Yellow Vests crisis in 2019 by consulting the French on the solutions born of the great national consultation. Then, in 2020, at the end of the citizens’ climate convention, he promised a referendum on the introduction of environmental protection into the Constitution. A lack of agreement between the two chambers, an essential prerequisite, forced him to abandon the idea.
Deprived of an absolute majority following the legislative elections of 2022, the president proposed, in 2023, to the representatives of the political forces represented in Parliament, to put to a referendum the proposals on which they would reach an agreement. While the right and the far right called for a vote on immigration, the idea of a consultation on this topic, which would require a change of Article 11 of the Constitution, which defines the procedure for legislative referendums, was quickly abandoned for lack of consensus.
At the beginning of 2024, part of his political entourage suggested that Macron consult the French people, instead of changing prime minister. In vain. “In seven years, around 30 of us must have written him a note on the referendum,” said a former Macronist minister.
‘Reconnection card’
Durably weakened since the misunderstood dissolution of Parliament on June 9, 2024, and the defeat of his political family in the legislative elections of June 30 and July 7, 2024, Macron is once again reviving the option of a referendum, the ultimate constitutional weapon at his disposal.
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