The leader of Los Republicanos rules out surprises in the motions of no confidence against the French government

March 20 () –

The president of the Los Republicanos party, Éric Ciotti, has downplayed the internal discrepancies over the motions of censure filed against the French government and has assumed that the pension reform will be definitively approved this Monday.

“I am sure”, Ciotti said, in an interview with the BFMTV channel in which he stressed that “the vast majority of the group of Los Republicanos will not vote in favor of any motion of no confidence”, hours before the two initiatives supported by the left and the extreme right.

These motions were presented on Friday, after Elisabeth Borne’s government resorted to article 49.3 of the Constitution to avoid losing a vote on the pension reform and that this initiative would go ahead, at the cost of endangering the survival of the government itself. Executive.

Ciotti has appealed to the “responsibility” of the traditional right in France, after several deputies have publicly expressed their support for the motion described as “transpartisan” and supported, among others, by the leader of La Francia Insumisa (LFI) Jean -Luc Melenchon.

For the president of Los Republicanos, voting in favor of one of the two motions is equivalent to “wishing” that Mélenchon could be prime minister or that the former presidential candidate of the National Group Marine Le Pen is in charge of Finance. “All this is ridiculous”, he has riveted.

Without widespread backing from Los Republicanos, the motions are bound to fail. For any of them to get ahead, they need the support of 287 legislators — there would be 289 under normal conditions, but there are two vacant seats — and the accounts do not go to the opposition.

If the surprise comes out, it would mean the fall of the current Executive and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, would have to designate a new team, without restrictions. In fact, he would have it in his power to reappoint Elisabeth Borne as prime minister, although the image of the leader has been damaged by all these weeks of parliamentary battles and protests in the streets.

French law does not oblige Macron to dissolve the National Assembly and, therefore, call new elections, something that some of the main opposition voices have been demanding in recent months at the dawn of the mobilizations unleashed against the pension reform, which proposes, among other measures, delaying the retirement age from 62 to 64 years.

Since Thursday, the protests have been constant and this Monday has dawned again with some barricades and blockades, as well as problems in some transport systems that affect, for example, the traffic of some of the main airports in France, according to Franceinfo.