After the health problems during the Covid-19 epidemic, energy is the theme of a Defense Council this Friday. For the opposition, the choice of the president to convene this body – a restricted Council of Ministers, meeting behind closed doors and without minutes – to discuss the supply of gas and electricity to France in the face of a high-voltage winter.
LFI MP Clémentine Autain sees this as the sign of a “great drift”. “The normalization of the management of the Covid crisis with closed-door debates subject to defense secrecy that replaces transparent debates,” she denounces.
“This Council of ‘defense’ has a great absence: democracy”, considers the elected representative of Seine-Saint-Denis.
“An undemocratic tool”
“Once again, Emmanuel Macron will use the defense council. An anti-democratic tool that allows the president to secretly make political decisions that compromise the country and worry millions of people,” lamented his rebel colleague Thomas Portes on Twitter. Before adding: “The president persists in authoritarianism.”
“‘Energy Defense Council’: either ‘everything will be fine’ then there is no need for these secret meetings. Or the fundamental interests of the country are at stake and then we must better anticipate and act transparently. What governments are doing Swiss and German”, judges environmentalist Julien Bayou.
“Since Covid, the defense council has now been used for any subject,” PS senator Marie-Pierre de la Gondrie still laments.
“The advantage? The secrecy and the lack of registration.” “What is the Council of Ministers for?” asks PS spokesperson Lamia El Aaraje on the set of BFMTV.
“Emmanuel Macron continues to choose to bypass Parliament,” laments Marine Le Pen, president of the RN group at the Palais-Bourbon. “Given the urgency of the energy situation, I propose that the National Assembly be convened as soon as possible. It is urgent to find solutions to protect the French without waiting for October.”
LFI denounces an “abuse of power”
It is within rebellious France that the opposition is strongest. “Threat of 49.3, Élisabeth Borne’s refusal to submit to the vote of confidence before Parliament and now again the Defense Council! Long live democracy with Macron sauce!”, Denounces the LFI deputy for Val-de-Marne Mathilde Panot.
The same reproach Raquel Garrido, for whom the Prime Minister and Parliament “should oppose this abuse of power by the president-monarch.”
It must be said that Jean-Luc Mélenchon, figurehead of the party, took a position very early on the issue. Since November 2020, in a column published in Releasehad criticized the use of the defense council during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“We will not know then why or how the decisions that the government copied without discussing were made,” he wrote then about the containment plan. “Whoever opens his mouth to the outside incurs criminal sanctions. But, with what right is the pandemic treated there? Because the defense code provides very precisely for the powers of this council. Nothing more than military,” he also wrote.
Véran evokes “issues of high strategic value”
The members of the government did not fail to defend this election of the president. “By definition, a Defense Council is secret, so only the president decides what comes out of the Defense Council,” confirms Mayor Bruno, on the sidelines of his trip to the beginning of the school year at Medef.
“We cannot talk about gas and energy without talking about Russia and the war in Ukraine. These are issues of high strategic value,” explains the government spokesman, Olivier Véran, in France Info, however, he assures that “the opposition have a vocation to work on these issues” and that “transparency will be the key and will be the rule”.
Source: BFM TV
