France: The Senate rules out a nationalization of EDF

The Senate adopted in first reading a socialist text against the "dismantling" of EDF, but ruled out a "nationalization". The Socialist group denounced "the attitude of the Senate right" and plans to take up the text again at the second reading in the National Assembly.

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The Senate, with a right-wing majority, voted on Thursday for the first reading of a socialist text against the “dismantling” of EDF, but ruling out a “nationalization” of the energy company, a key article of the bill.

The bill of the deputy Philippe Brun, emptied of its substance at the initiative of the rapporteur LR Gérard Longuet, was examined in a parliamentary niche reserved for the PS group. It was adopted by 206 votes “for” and 123 “against”. In the end, the left voted against, the socialist group denouncing “the attitude of the Senate right, which has totally distorted this bill.

The RDPI group, with a Renaissance majority, also voted against “a skeletal text, and even then, when archaeologists find an incomplete skeleton,” said Julien Bargeton. In the National Assembly, the GDR group has already planned to take it up at second reading on May 4, in its reserved space. The Minister of Industry Roland Lescure said that “this bill aims to respond to anxieties that have no reason to be”.

“The Hercules project (controversial project of restructuring of EDF, editor’s note) is dead and buried. There is no visible or hidden project of dismantling our national operator,” he assured once again. The senators deleted the nationalization procedure provided for in Article 1, which was deemed unnecessary in view of the takeover bid undertaken by the State. They replaced it with the objective of a 100% state ownership of EDF.

But for the Socialist Franck Montaugé, this “very liberal approach (…) leaves open all subsequent operations of sale of subsidiaries”. “Nationalizing EDF is to rearm France,” Victorin Lurel pleaded in vain. The Senate has also maintained in the text, after rewriting, the article aimed at extending the benefit of regulated tariffs for the sale of electricity to all very small businesses (VSE) and small municipalities. This article, which the government opposes, was almost dropped in a moment of confusion and had to be voted on again at the request of the president of the PS group, Patrick Kanner.

The bill was adopted on first reading in the National Assembly thanks to the cooperation of all the oppositions against the presidential camp, which left the Chamber accusing the provision on regulated tariffs of circumventing the Constitution.

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