The initiative of La France Insoumise (LFI) to remove Emmanuel Macron from the presidency of the Republic will experience its first key stage on Tuesday morning, September 17. From 9:30 a.m., the office of the National Assembly, the highest collegiate body of the institution, will have to examine the admissibility of the procedure initiated by the “rebels”. It should therefore be validated with the support of environmentalists, communists and even socialists who finally announced, on Monday evening, September 16, that they did not want to hinder the process.
From a long night session with comings and goings, during the installation of the XVIImy legislature, on 19 July, it is the New Popular Front (NFP) which has a majority of twelve seats out of twenty-two in the Assembly, chaired by Yaël Braun-Pivet (Together for the Republic, EPR, Yvelines).
This new majority in office fuelled the ambitions of the LFI, which on 17 August threatened Emmanuel Macron with impeachment proceedings if he did not appoint Lucie Castets, a candidate from the NFP, to the post of Prime Minister in Matignon. Once the senior official was dismissed, the “rebels” put their words into practice and presented their text.
Introduced by the 2007 constitutional revision, this procedure for impeaching the President of the Republic, which has never been successful, requires a two-thirds majority of Parliament to constitute itself as a High Court. The procedure is limited to a single reading in each Chamber, all of them within a period of fifteen days. Article 68 of the Constitution provides that the head of State cannot be impeached. “in the event of a breach of his duties that is manifestly incompatible with the exercise of his mandate”.
An ambiguous definition that allows parliamentarians to assess for themselves any attack on the function for which the President of the Republic is held responsible. A sanction above all political, since the Head of State remains irresponsible at the criminal, civil and administrative level during the exercise of his functions.
The purely technical justification of the PS group
Although the NFP has a majority in the National Assembly, socialists, communists and ecologists quickly distanced themselves from the “rebels” initiative in the middle of summer. “This is not the line or priority of environmentalists. Is it a big deal that they have done this? No. Is this our position? Neither. Should we give it much importance? Neither.”Marine Tondelier, national secretary of the Ecologists, told BFM TV.
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