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This Week

• ⬇️Aurélien Pradié demoted by Eric Ciotti

• 🛑Rassemblement National censure motion fails

• 👨‍💻France learns future warfare lessons from Ukraine

• 💶Good news, everyone: we’re avoiding a recession

⬇️Aurélien Pradié demoted by Eric Ciotti

With his intense opposition to the Pension Reform, Aurélien Pradié made himself a thorn in the side of the new president of Les Républicains (LR), Eric Ciotti.

With Ciotti and Olivier Marleix, the leader of the LR group in the Assemblée national, having been supporting the government's pension reform project for weeks by this point, the regular attacks against the government by Pradié became a little too much

Personally campaigning against a segment of the reform related to people with long careers needing to contribute for 44 years, he went against a line of the government reform that was even debated within the majority and which most of the LR supported.

In a press release, Eric Ciotti, the president of LR explained his decision, denouncing a “personal adventure” that “cannot replace collective action and the spirit of responsibility”:

"His repeated positions [were] no longer in line with the values ​​of coherence, unity and unity which must guide the Republican right."

With Pradié having threatened to not vote for the reform despite his party having an agreement with the government, he recently support an amendment pushed forward by Horizons to prevent anybody with a long career from having to contribute more than 43 years to the pension pot.

However, as said by one of Ciotti’s team, the fact that “he was applauded by the NUPES [group] was the last straw that broke the camel's back”

Pradié was notified of his exclusion via SMS, after Ciotti could not reach him by phone.

🛑Rassemblement National censure motion fails

As the battle for Pension reform rages on, the various actors are doing everything they can to draw any advantage from what is becoming an increasingly unstable war for public opinion.

While they have not been as active as the other parties, such as La France Insoumise, which opted for more obstructive tactics with over 20,000 amendments to the law, the Rassemblement National (RN) have still been doing their bit to benefit from the instability.

Putting forward a censure motion during the week, which surprised just about everybody, Marine Le Pen’s party found itself isolated with only 89 votes in favour, supported only by her own political group and Nicolas Dupont-Aignan (Debout la France)

Having described the pension reform efforts as a “needy project” riven with “repeated failures”, Le Pen had hoped for support from the left and the NUPES Coalition but failed to remember that her party were still the black sheep in the Assemblée National.

André Chassaigne (PCF), president of the Democratic and Republic Left Group, responded by saying that “Never, in the name of the history of our country, will we mix our votes with those who do not consider all human beings as brothers”.

Mélanie Thomin (PS-NUPES) said similar: “We are proud never, I say never, to serve the extreme right and to feed its cynical project”. Hadrien Clouet (LFI-NUPES) described the move as “a bad joke” and called the RN a “cardboard opposition”

From the government side, they weren’t much nicer.

Élisabeth Borne was brutal in her criticism of the RN while demanding that Marine Le Pen “give the floor back to France” while decrying the censure motion as being “as substantial as the participations of Marine LE Pen in the debates:

“This motion of censure was tabled by a group whose silence has been deafening throughout the debates, and whose votes say nothing but the opportunism of each moment”

LCP @LCP

"Cette motion de censure a été déposée par un groupe dont le silence a été assourdissant tout au long des débats, et dont les votes ne disent rien d'autre que l'opportunisme de chaque instant", observe @Elisabeth_Borne à propos du RN. #Retraites #MotionDeCensure #DirectAN

11:43 PM ∙ Feb 17, 2023

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Ultimately, what we’re seeing now from the Assemblée National doesn’t draw many kind words from anybody. Many, including myself, are decrying the behaviour of many deputies as circus-like, finding ourselves disappointed by the lack of genuine debate and the repeated screaming matches being started by certain deputies.

While politics will always be politics, the Assemblée National is one of the pillars of our democracy, and certain deputies may want to remember this and focus on doing their jobs to represent we French people.

👨‍💻France learns future warfare lessons from Ukraine

Moving over to a more international topic, the French Armée de Terre have announced that they are looking at how to transform their structures to take on board the lessons learned from the Russian Invasion of Ukraine.

One of the big suggestions is the reduction of frontline units, i.e. those comprised of infantry and tanks, in favour of increasing the number of those comprised of cyber and drone units.

While a lot of the changes will depend on the realities of the upcoming Military Programming Law (LPM), the €413 billion programme, which you can read about here, the challenges the army will face have to be faced now.

This is why General Pierre Schill has already begun to work on this and announced that they “must return to a global coherence of the army” without “disbanding” any garrisons and weakening the French army.

This is why the Army is working towards creating two new commands, both at the same level as the land forces command, which controls 77,000 men. One will be focused on future warfare, while the other will focus on hybrid warfare and special actions.

The ‘future warfare’ command will focus on new Army capabilities, such as remotely operated ammunition, air defence, and anti-drone combat. The Hybrid Warfare and Special actions command will try to reinforce regiments ability to engage with cyber capabilities within regiments in the field.

General Pierre-Joseph Givre, who manages the Centre for doctrine and command instruction (CDEC), had this to say:

“There is a real need to make the Army more autonomous. It must have under its command all areas of warfare, anti-aircraft, cyber, information, deep strikes … while remaining interoperable with other armies. When we outsource actions, we create dependencies, which is risky in a high-intensity conflict where we always operate under the constraints of events and time."

If you want to read more about this topic, comment below! I would be happy to explore more topics about the French military if it’s of interest to you all.

💶Good news, everyone: we’re avoiding a recession

Let’s end this dispatch with some good news for everyone.

This week, the European Commission announced that the inflation forecast for the eurozone in 2023 was looking good, with a -0.5 point drop to 5.6% and that “the peak is now behind us” due to the drop in energy prices.

However, for the entirety of the European Union, Inflation is expected to be higher at 6.4%, despite seeing a similar -0.6 point drop in inflation.

We also have some more good news: the growth forecast for the Eurozone is improving, with the Commission having revised the forecast for 2023 up by +0.6 points to 0.9%, with the EU growth figures (+0.8%) seeing similar with a +0.5 point increase.

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