The eighth day of demonstrations and strikes in France against a very unpopular pension reform wanted by Emmanuel Macron saw a much smaller mobilization on Wednesday, on the eve of the text being put to the vote by the two assemblies.
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In the evening, the French President will meet his Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne and some of the most important ministers affected by the reform.
But he has no plans “at this stage” to have it passed without a vote by a 49.3, the article of the Constitution that allows a text to be passed without a vote, we learn from consistent sources in the president’s camp. .
MPs and senators on Wednesday agreed on a joint version of the controversial project, with the most notorious measure being to push the statutory retirement age to 64.
On Thursday, that text will go to the Senate for a vote, where unsurprisingly the right-wing and centrist majority should approve it, and then to the National Assembly, where the presidential camp does not have an absolute majority. The vote there is uncertain: when the right-wing party Les Républicains says they want to accept the reform, many rebels in their ranks keep the tension up.
“I say to the parliamentarians, do not vote for this law, it is detached from the concrete reality of work,” began Laurent Berger, general secretary of the reformist CFDT trade union, on Wednesday.
The union “solemnly calls on parliamentarians to vote against the bill.” France’s eight largest unions will hold a press conference before the National Assembly on Thursday in a final attempt to influence the vote.
Since January 19, millions of French people have already demonstrated to express their opposition to this reform, after Wednesday was the 8th day of mobilization.
The lowering of the statutory retirement age from 62 to 64 crystallizes the anger. Opponents of this reform consider it “unfair”, especially for women and those in difficult jobs.
The French government has decided to raise the statutory retirement age in response to the financial deterioration of pension funds and the aging of the population.
France is one of the European countries with the lowest statutory retirement age, although pension systems are not fully comparable.
A total of 480,000 people demonstrated on Wednesday in France, including 37,000 in Paris, against the pension reform at the call of the unions, according to a census by the Interior Ministry.
For this 8th day of mobilization, the CGT trade union counted 1.78 million demonstrators. According to the Interior Ministry, 368,000 people demonstrated in France last Saturday, 48,000 of them in Paris.
On the tenth day of the refuse collectors’ strike against this reform in the streets of Paris, the accumulation of rubbish bins in this world capital of tourism has worsened, with more than 7,600 tons of rubbish clogging the sidewalks, according to the city hall.
Garbage collectors and cleaning workers in the city of Paris voted on Tuesday evening to continue the strike “at least until March 20”.
In addition to garbage collection in several cities in France, renewable strikes continue in several key sectors.
The strikers from the CGT Énergie union have therefore threatened to reduce the pressure in the gas networks, otherwise the strikers will deal with what could deprive power plants and certain industrial customers of the gas.
Workers at four French LNG terminals and 11 storage sites have extended their strikes until early next week.
Several refineries were still on strike and rail and air services remained disrupted.
President Macron plays an important role in his political credit for this reform, a flagship measure of his second five-year term and a symbol of his declared commitment to reform, but one that reflects the dissatisfaction of some French people against him.