Emmanuel Macron chose a showdown at the last moment: he will pass his decried pension reform project in France without a vote in the National Assembly, a thunderclap that could relaunch social protest.
“I engage the responsibility of my government on the entire bill,” asserted Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne, raising her voice to pass over the hubbub of opposition deputies.
Thousands of demonstrators gathered at Place de la Concorde, not far from parliament, before being driven out by the police around 8 p.m. (3 p.m. in Montreal), when tensions began to flare. The inter-union fighting against the reform also called on Thursday for “gatherings” this weekend and for a ninth day of strikes on March 23.
Thursday was D-Day for this crucial reform for Emmanuel Macron’s political credibility during his second term.
Until now, the French president had made it known that he did not want to resort to article 49.3 of the Constitution, which allows a bill to be passed without submitting it to a vote. He said he preferred to see the deputies decide on the reform, although his coalition did not have an absolute majority in the National Assembly. But after countless negotiations, the executive considered it too risky to go to the vote on this bill, which increases the retirement age from 62 to 64 years old.
All the tenors of the opposition castigated this decision. “Parliament will have been flouted and humiliated until the end,” denounced the leader of the Communist deputies, Fabien Roussel. “It is an acknowledgment of total failure of this government […] and for Emmanuel Macron,” said the leader of the far-right National Rally party, Marine Le Pen.
The government led by Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne is now exposed to various motions of censure. The deputies of the presidential coalition, however, have a relative majority in the Assembly; almost all the other deputies, from the extreme left to the extreme right, would have to agree to put the government in a minority.
New mobilizations
The use of section 49.3 is a setback, according to many political commentators. “The 49.3, in the imagination of the French, is synonymous with brutality”, summarized to AFP the expert in public opinion Antoine Bristielle, of the Jean-Jaurès Foundation. “In the street, this will give a second wind to the mobilization. »
“Obviously there will be new mobilizations, because the protest is extremely strong”, reacted the leader of the CFDT union, Laurent Berger.
Since January 19, hundreds of thousands of French people have demonstrated eight times to express their rejection of this reform, against a backdrop of renewable strikes, like that of the Parisian garbage collectors. The sidewalks of the French capital, one of the most touristic cities in the world, are thus covered in places with smelly waste.
Opponents of this reform consider it “unfair”. The various opinion polls show that the French are mostly hostile to it, even if the number of demonstrators has stagnated or declined over time.
The French government says it has chosen to raise the legal retirement age to respond to the financial deterioration of pension funds. France is one of the European countries where this age is the lowest, although the different pension systems on the continent are not completely comparable.