Many people demonstrated with family, taking advantage of the weekend: hundreds of thousands of people mobilized on Saturday in France for the fourth day of action in less than a month against the pension reform, emblematic project of President Macron .
“We will not die at work”: a banner displayed in the Parisian procession, 500,000 strong according to the CGT union, seemed to sum up the state of mind of the demonstrators who reject the flagship measure of the reform: the decline of the legal retirement age from 62 to 64 years old.
Before the start of the Paris demonstration, the leaders of the intersyndicale confirmed their call for two new days of mobilization, February 16 and March 7, and said they were ready to “harden the movement” and “put the country at risk”. ‘stop’ if nothing moves.
A call for a strike renewable from March 7 was immediately launched by the inter-union of the RATP (Paris metro).
In most cities, the mobilization remained strong on Saturday, even if the figures vary enormously according to the sources. In Clermont-Ferrand (center) the unions notably claimed 50,000 participants against 8,000 according to the prefecture. In Toulouse (south-west), the CGT claimed “more than 100,000 demonstrators”, the prefecture 25,000.
Among the placards in the parades, one could read “Macron, stop your calculations, we know that you feather us” or “For the retirement of the reform”.
“I’m here because it’s Saturday, the week it’s not possible”, explained in the Lyon procession Marie-Pierre Couvreur, 43, an engineer, who came with her three children to show them “that it is necessary to defend oneself “.
Upstream, the boss of the reformist union CFDT, Laurent Berger, had estimated that “exceeding the million demonstrators, it would be a great success”.
To control these crowds, 10,000 police and gendarmes were mobilized, including 4,500 in the capital, where a few incidents occurred in the afternoon, including a car overturned on the road and set on fire.
There was no strike at SNCF or RATP, but one out of two flights was canceled at Orly, due to an unexpected strike by air traffic controllers.
” Divorce “
This is the fourth time in less than a month that the French have been called upon to strike and demonstrate against this reform, which is currently being considered by deputies.
The three previous days of action brought together between 757,000 and 1.27 million people according to the authorities (between nearly two million and more than 2.5 million according to the inter-union), without influencing the executive, which is holding firm. on raising the legal retirement age to 64.
Comments on Friday by Emmanuel Macron in Brussels, calling on the organizers of the protest to “keep their spirit of responsibility”, angered the unions, who in turn accuse the head of state of not “listening” to the country. .
If the government does not take into account the demands of the French on pensions, “we will have at the end of this reform an even more pronounced, even more worrying divorce between the French and those who govern us”, warned Saturday Xavier Bertrand , a leader of the Republicans (LR), the right-wing party on which the presidential majority is counting to pass its text in Parliament.
“Mr. Macron, if he is counting on wear and tear, is in the wrong country”, judged for his part in Marseille the leader of the radical left opposition, Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
Currently before the deputies, the examination of the text since the beginning of the week has so far only given rise to repetitive debates and invectives.
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 extend working hours in response to the financial deterioration of pension funds and the aging of the population.