After the big parades against the pension reforms on Tuesday, then the mobilizations for women’s rights on Wednesday, environmental activists who will shout their anger.
Pensions and climate, same fight. This is one of the slogans that we have seen in the processions since the beginning of the demonstrations against the pension reform. After the big parades against the pension reform on Tuesday March 7, then the mobilizations for women’s rights the next day, and young people against the pension reform on Thursday, it is the environmental activists who will shout their anger, at the call of the Friday For Future association, Friday 10 March. In the two causes defended, for environmental activists, it is above all a question of social justice.
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Louise, 19, will be on the street this Friday, March 10, 2023. And this will be her fourth event of the week. “We are not fighting for the climate as such, but we are fighting to make society properly, she explains. And that of course joins the pension reform. With climate change, the people who will pay are the most precarious people, they are the students who live in thermal sieves, they are also single-parent families. And the refusal of this new pension system that is proposed to us, is quite simply a refusal of a model that no longer works and that we must imperatively change..”
Eugénie is fourteen years old. If retirement is still a long way off and the questions of hardship, premium or annuities are still quite theoretical, she does not hide her concern. When she thinks about it, she says she feels”helpless“on social issues such as the climate. Above all, she has the impression that the political world does not listen to young people.”I hope people who can make political decisions will make them the right way. I put myself in the place of people who are really desperate. I am too, but suddenly, I challenge the government: what will happen? If nobody does anything, we will all die”she complains.
“The fear that it will be even worse than now”
And it is this fear of the future that brings young people to the streets, says Pablo Fries, spokesperson for the Friday for Future association. “We project ourselves into a future that is very uncertain for us, with the fear that it will be even worse than now, because we know it, the experts say ithe assures. And to say to ourselves that, on top of that, we are going to suffer attacks on our social rights and that we are going to have to work until the age of 64 when we will have spent our lives being worn down by the fact of fighting against the consequences of global warming, all this leads to mobilization.“
Demonstrations are planned in around thirty cities in France, such as Dijon, Quimper, Strasbourg, Paris or Lille for example. After the marches this Friday, March 3, the association is in solidarity with the new demonstrations planned for Saturday against the pension reform.