For the candidates for the “breakthrough” programs, the obstacles will not stop after the presidential election. Let’s do a bit of political fiction: even holder of the 500 sponsorships, winner of the ballot then the legislative elections in the process, the new president – if it is Marine Le Pen, Eric Zemmour, or Jean-Luc Mélenchon – could find it prevented from implementing its project. The explanation is to be sought on the side of the Senate… and rue de Montpensier, in Paris, the seat of the Constitutional Council. On Tuesday, February 4, 2020, Laurent Fabius, the president of the supreme institution of French law, received a handful of journalists there. The news was marked by the proposed referendum of a shared initiative launched a few months earlier to counter the possible privatization of Aéroports de Paris. At the bend of a response, the former Prime Minister delivered an apparently technical precision: “The referendum of article 11 cannot be used to revise the Constitution. For that, it is necessary to use article 89.”
Behind the legal sabir nestles a bomb. Because the announcement of the Chief of the Sages means indirectly… that no referendum calling into question the most sensitive elements of our law can be convened without the approval of the National Assembly and, above all, of the Senate. Marine Le Pen or Eric Zemmour, at the time a thousand leagues from engaging in politics, can put their immigration program aside, except to convince the senators. Even Jean-Luc Mélenchon would potentially be prevented from proposing his Sixth Republic. The clarification of the boss of the Constitutional Council is unprecedented under the Fifth Republic – until then, a scholarly ambiguity had always been maintained. According to Jean-Philippe Derosier, professor of public law at the University of Lille, this reasoning is implacable legally
