Two motions of censure were tabled Friday against the French government, plunged into a political crisis after its passage in force on the pension reform, which amplified social anger and triggered scuffles in the middle of Paris.
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Several thousand people gathered on Friday evening at Place de la Concorde, a few hundred meters from the National Assembly. A blaze was lit by demonstrators, and the atmosphere became tense as night fell, with police charging into the crowd, according to AFP journalists.
Several hundred people confronted the police with bottles and fireworks, who responded with tear gas, trying to evacuate the place in the rain. There were 61 arrests around 9:30 p.m. (8:30 p.m. GMT), according to the police headquarters.
In Lyon (center-east) demonstrators burst into a district town hall and “tried to set the fire”, but the police quickly extinguished the fire and arrested six people, according to the prefecture.
Also in Lyon, a few hundred young people set fire to trash cans, overturned scooters, smashed billboards, threw firecrackers and tagged shop windows, chanting: “Whose is it? Whose ? It’s up to us!”, according to an AFP journalist on the spot. The police responded by using tear gas.
In Strasbourg (east), it was on Place Kléber that 1,600 protesters gathered. “We too will go through in force,” chanted the demonstrators. The prefecture reported “degradation” in the city center, but no arrests.
A thousand people marched in the center of Lille (north), and a procession of a few hundred dispersed smoothly in Bordeaux (south-west).
The motions of censure should be examined in the National Assembly on Monday from 4:00 p.m. (3:00 p.m. GMT), according to parliamentary sources, subject to validation just before the session.
The deputies of the centrist independent parliamentary group Liot announced to the Assembly the tabling of a “transpartisan” motion of censure of the government, co-signed by elected members of the Nupes (radical left).
The National Rally (far right) also filed a motion of censure on Friday, castigating an “unfair and unnecessary reform”.
These steps are responses to President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to resort to the weapon of Article 49.3 of the Constitution on Thursday, allowing the adoption of a text without a vote in the Assembly, unless a motion of censure comes. to overthrow the government.
This choice on this very unpopular pension reform “is the apogee of an unacceptable denial of democracy”, affirms in particular the motion of Liot.
This motion of censure is the one that could potentially cause the most problems for the government, because of its transpartisan side.
On Friday, the general secretary of the reformist union CFDT, Laurent Berger, called on the French president to “withdraw the reform”.
To bring down the government, a motion of censure will have to collect an absolute majority in the Assembly, ie 287 votes. This would require in particular that around thirty right-wing deputies Les Républicains (out of 61) vote for the motion of the Liot group.
The French government has chosen to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64 in response to the financial deterioration of pension funds and the aging of the population.
France is one of the European countries where the legal retirement age is the lowest, even if the pension systems are not completely comparable.
This measure of the decline in the legal retirement age crystallizes the anger. Opinion polls show that the French are mostly hostile to it, even if the number of demonstrators in the streets and of strikers has stagnated or declined over time.
The use of 49.3 is almost unanimously considered a setback for Emmanuel Macron, who has bet a lot of his political credit on this key reform of his second five-year term.
The intersyndicale called for “local union rallies this weekend” and a ninth “big day of strikes and demonstrations on Thursday March 23”.
Thorny consequence of the renewable strikes among garbage collectors, the health situation in Paris is worsening: the bar of 10,000 tonnes of uncollected waste was reached on Friday, according to the estimate of the town hall, on the twelfth day of the strike.
The four representative unions of the national railway company SNCF called on Friday to “maintain the strike” started on March 7 and “to act massively on March 23” to oppose the reform.
The General Directorate of Civil Aviation asked airlines to cancel Monday 30% of their flights at Paris-Orly and 20% at Marseille-Provence (south-east), due to the strike movement of air traffic controllers against the pension reform.