• Tuesday, on the eve of the meeting of the joint committee (CMP) on the pension reform, the boss of the PS deputies Boris Vallaud asked for a retransmission of the exchanges.
  • The Speaker of the National Assembly refused this request, as meetings of the CMP are usually held behind closed doors.
  • Faced with this refusal, the leader of the rebellious deputies Mathilde Panot, a member of this committee, tweeted all day Wednesday to report on the debates. This raises the question of the publicity of parliamentary debates, with Elsa Foucraut, an expert in transparency in public life and a professor at Sciences Po.

On Wednesday, the news on the pension reform accelerated. On the one hand, in the street, an eighth day of mobilization against the bill, at the call of the inter-union. On the other, in the National Assembly, a joint committee to find a compromise, at the end of the afternoon.

The opposition has tried, in vain, to make public political debates provided for behind closed doors by parliamentary law. An initiative, certainly rejected, but which had the merit of bringing up to date the reflection on the transparency of discussions in politics. Does the lack of publicity of certain debates weaken democracy? Do all decisions have to be made in public? Elsa Foucraut, an expert in transparency in public life and professor at Sciences Po.


The PS requested the broadcasting of the CMP debates. Is this type of request unprecedented?

To my knowledge, this is a first, because in general the joint committees are bodies unknown to the general public. But what must be understood is that these committees are normally places of compromise, where parliamentarians go to discuss without the government. Here, however, the current political sequence totally derogates from the normal functioning of the institutions. Today's CMP is not only a space for compromise but also for initial debate, because the National Assembly was unable to debate this text to the end, in a context where the social movement is of a scale not seen for several decades.

Can this request therefore be justified by the fact that the parliamentary debate has been partly glossed over?

In my opinion, if the demand for media coverage is out of the norm, it is primarily because the institutional context is also out of the norm. If parliamentarians do this, it is because there is an echo in society, and there is always something to celebrate when citizens are interested in parliamentary procedure. This is a sign that political life is not disconnected from social life.

In recent decades, several profound movements in society can be observed. They are contradictory and coexist with each other: a demand for more deliberation and consultation, a political disinvestment of some citizens, and, also, a very strong ambiguity of the public authorities on issues of transparency. In recent years, there has clearly been a step backwards on issues of transparency in public decision-making, with a tendency to bypass Parliament.

Where does the media coverage of debates within political life in the 5th Republic come from? Was it gradual?

It goes back well before the establishment of the 5th Republic. From the French Revolution, when revolutionaries instituted a National Assembly, debates were open to the public and this was a fundamental political marker. Media coverage and publicity of parliamentary debates are part of democratic principles.

Shouldn't decision-making places be kept behind closed doors?

It is illusory to think that absolutely everything could be public, and no one is asking for it. But we are far from this situation. Today, the National Assembly and the Senate are the most transparent institutions, but what happens upstream and downstream is relatively non-transparent.

We are very far from a situation where anyone could easily follow all the phases of a public decision, from the elaboration to the publication of the implementing decrees, and know who influenced it... Many political discussions remain behind closed doors, and the Covid period has been emblematic of this: we went through decisions in defense council, so without public deliberation.



Unlike Parliament, the preparatory work of the executive before a bill is covered by the secrecy of government proceedings, protected for 25 years. In our time, such a long protection seems exorbitant and a little archaic.

The challenge is not to seek absolute transparency, but to give citizens the tools to understand how decisions are made, to ensure equal access for citizens to public decision-makers, and to ensure that politicians can both act effectively and be accountable.

Can political practice make it possible to bring more transparency to the debates, or will it necessarily be necessary to go through the law or the regulation?

We see that new political practices are emerging. There are often consultations on bills, there are also elected officials who decide to be more transparent by sharing their agenda to improve the transparency of lobbying. When elected officials adopt a practice, it sometimes influences their colleagues. But it is also political practice that brings us to the current situation: nothing in the law required the government to go through the unusual procedures it chose. But there are also things to be changed by law, such as lowering the secrecy of government deliberations.

  • Pension reform 2023
  • Society