France was preparing for a decisive day of action on Monday against a pension reform wanted by President Emmanuel Macron, but unpopular, with the unions predicting in unison the “shutdown” of the country by strikes and protests. demonstrations.
“I call on the employees of this country, the citizens, the retirees to come and demonstrate massively” on Tuesday, said Monday the secretary general of the reformist union CFDT, Laurent Berger. “The President of the Republic cannot remain deaf,” he said.
This is, since January 19, the sixth day of mobilization against this pension reform and its postponement of the legal retirement age from 62 to 64 years – it is this point which crystallizes all the opposition -, to which the French are mostly hostile, judging it “unfair”, especially for employees in difficult jobs.
For weeks, the unions have been increasing the pressure and hammering at the French people that they must prepare to live 24 hours in a country “at a standstill”, announcing monster demonstrations and renewable strikes in strategic sectors in an attempt to bend the government.
The unions want to do better than January 31, when the police had identified 1.27 million participants and the inter-union more than 2.5 million in the streets of France.
The intersyndicale is counting on a gradual start of the strikes on Monday evening in order to obtain a massive movement on Tuesday at dawn.
More unusual hangs
Truckers deployed filter barriers on Monday morning, adding to expected transport disruptions. The teachers will be on strike again.
The national rail company SNCF and the RATP (which manages the Paris metro) warned that traffic would be badly affected on Tuesday. Production declines continue in the electricity sector, whose movement began on Friday.
The government has encouraged those who can to telework.
The unions also expect more unusual initiatives: construction sites stopped, store curtains closed, tolls open, roads blocked, etc.
The bill carrying this reform, under discussion before the Senate, has already brought millions of French people to the streets and given rise to heated debates in the National Assembly.
The government has so far refused to go back on its plan, despite the last five days of action.
Emmanuel Macron plays a significant part of his political credit on this flagship measure of his second five-year term, symbol of his declared desire to reform, but which today crystallizes the discontent of part of the French against him.
This reform was “poorly prepared”, considers in an editorial the newspaper Releasewho criticizes a “ministerial cacophony and the multiple failures of communication that accompanied his presentation before the French and then before the deputies”.
“Nobody likes it”
France is one of the European countries where the legal retirement age is the lowest, without the pension systems being completely comparable. The government has chosen to raise it to respond to the financial deterioration of pension funds and the aging of the population.
The Senate – dominated by the right – voted Monday, against the advice of the government and despite the opposition of the left, the creation of a new type of indefinite term contract of “end of career” to promote the recruitment of employees aged 60 or over.
The debates in the Senate will end no matter what on Friday. The text will then be transmitted to a joint committee bringing together the two chambers which, in the event of agreement, will have to adopt it definitively.
Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne has planned to speak Monday evening on television.
After several months of cautious silence, Emmanuel Macron was arrested last week about this reform during outings in contact with the French.
“We all know that, living older, there is no miracle: if we want to preserve a pay-as-you-go system, we have to work longer. I’m not saying it makes us happy, it doesn’t make anyone happy,” he said, citing a “common sense” conclusion.