The Senate approves the pension reform wanted by Macron. Great tension in France
The square heats up in France. The French Senate approved the deeply unpopular reform of the country’s pension system on Saturday evening. A green light that came a few hours after the demonstrators had marched to oppose the fundamental passage of the second term of President Emmanuel Macron. THE senators approved the reform with 195 votes against 112. A commission will now draw up a final draft which will then be submitted both to the Senate and to the National Assembly for the final vote. “An important step was taken tonight with a large vote on the pension reform text in the Senate,” Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne told AFP after the vote, adding that she believed the government had a parliamentary majority to make it happen. pass reforms into law. If Macron’s government fails to assemble the necessary majority, however, Borne could use a rarely used and highly controversial constitutional tool known as Article 49/3 to pass legislation without a vote. Unions, which have fiercely opposed the measures, were still hoping to force Macron to back down on Saturday, though the day’s protests against the reform were far more subdued than some earlier ones.
“This is the final stretch,” Marylise Leon, deputy leader of the CFDT union, told Franceinfo broadcaster on Saturday. “The endgame is now.” Tension flared in the evening, with Paris police saying they had made 32 arrests after some protesters they threw objects at the security forces, with trash cans burned and windows smashed. This week Macron has twice turned down urgent calls from unions to meet with him in a last-ditch effort to change his mind. The snub made the unions “very angry”, said Philippe Martinez, head of the far-left CGT union. “When there are millions of people in the streets, when there are strikes and all we get on the other side is silence, people ask: what else must we do to be heard?” he said, calling for a referendum on pension reform. The interior ministry said some 368,000 people turned out nationwide for the protests, less than half of the 800,000 to 1 million that police had expected.
In Paris, 48,000 people took part in the demonstrations, compared with police forecasts of around 100,000. The unions, which put the attendance figure at one million, had hoped that voter turnout would be greatest on Saturdays, when most people didn’t have to take time off work to participate.
On 11 February, also on Saturday, 963,000 people demonstrated, according to the police. On the last big day of strike and protest on Tuesday, voter turnout was just under 1.3 million according to police and more than three million according to unions. – The main measure of the reform is an increase in the minimum retirement age to 64 from 62, considered by many to be unfair to those who started working at a young age. “I’m here to fight for my colleagues and for our young people,” said Claude Jeanvoine, 63, a retired train driver demonstrating in Strasbourg, eastern France. “People shouldn’t let the government get away with it, it’s about the future of their children and grandchildren,” he told AFP. The reforms would also increase the number of years people need to pay contributions to receive a full pension. Protesters say women, especially mothers, are also disadvantaged by the new reforms.
“If I had known this was going to happen, I wouldn’t have stopped working to take care of my children when they were little,” said Sophie Merle, a 50-year-old childcare provider in the southern city of Marseille. Several sectors of the French economy have been targeted by union calls for indefinite strikes, including rail and air transport, power plants, natural gas terminals and waste collection. Urban transit in Paris was little affected by the shutdowns on Saturday, with the exception of some suburban train lines. But uncollected rubbish has started piling up in some neighborhoods of the capital and airlines have canceled around 20% of their scheduled flights at French airports.
An opinion poll released on Saturday by broadcaster Bfmtv found that 63% of French people approved of the protests against the reform and 54% were also in favor of strikes and blockades in some sectors. About 78 percent, however, said they believed Macron would eventually push through the reform.
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