Since Emmanuel Macron accepted the resignation of Gabriel Attal’s government on 16 July, ministers have been limited to managing current affairs. They are supposed to ensure “daily life”, the continuity of the State or urgent situations, without taking political action.
Almost two months after the second round of legislative elections, while the President of the Republic has not yet appointed a Prime Minister, some of his political opponents denounce “an abuse of power” : “ When we look at this resigned government, it looks more and more like a fully-fledged government.“This is a very important issue,” said MP Mathilde Panot, president of the La France insoumise group in the National Assembly, in Franceinfo on August 30. Since July 16, more than 1,300 decrees have been published in Official Journal. »
A spike in post-legislative activity
HE Official Journal of the French Republic publishes daily official texts related to the activity of the State – treaties, ordinances, laws, normative texts, declarations, legal publications, etc. It appears in paper and digital format.
In these publications made available by the Directorate of Legal and Administrative Information (DILA), we try to understand what falls within the activity of the government, selecting, among all the decrees, orders or circulars, the categories “general texts” and “nominative measures”, in order to exclude acts of independent administrative authorities or decisions of the Council of State.
This quantitative analysis shows a significant increase between June 30, the date of the first round of the 2024 legislative elections, and the resignation of the government. The observed peak has no equivalent since the period following the election of Emmanuel Macron in 2017.
It then declines, although still higher than the usual number of texts published in previous years, until approximately July 20. From the beginning of August, government activity was reflected in the Official Journal is below the level of previous years.
Among these “leftover” texts from the beginning of summer, it is difficult to know by these quantitative means which ones could go beyond the current context of a resigning government.
A significant part of the texts published since July are related to the functioning of the “state machinery”: delegations of signatures, admissions to retirement of civil servants, orders establishing the list of persons authorised to practise the profession of doctor, promotions to the labour inspection sector… Some are related to “urgent” situations such as the temporary creation of a no-go zone in the Marseille region. “for reasons of public safety, on the occasion of the Olympic Games” (Official Journal (of July 19).
But the political nuance of some of the texts published in Official Journal provokes intense criticism from the opposition. On July 24, the first secretary of the Socialist Party, Olivier Faure, warned the vice-president of the Council of State, Didier-Roland Tabuteau, of a “recent series of appointments to senior positions within the central administration with deferred start dates.”
