(Paris) The pension reform, extremely unpopular but desired by French President Emmanuel Macron, was definitively adopted on Monday after two months of major protests which considerably weakened his government faced with a major social and political crisis. .
Trash fires, barricades, processions pacing the streets: sporadic points of tension have punctuated several arteries in the center of Paris and several cities in France in the evening. In the capital, a hundred people were arrested.
The National Assembly rejected two motions of censure, resulting in the final adoption by Parliament of the contested bill providing for a postponement of the legal age from 62 to 64 years.
If the motion presented by the far right received only 94 votes out of the 297 necessary, a first cross-partisan motion had previously been narrowly rejected, with nine votes, illustrating the fragility of the position of the executive.
These motions, aimed at overthrowing the government of Elisabeth Borne, had been tabled after the executive’s decision on Thursday to use article 49.3 of the Constitution to pass its bill without a vote, castigated as a “denial of democracy” by the opposition parties.
They were debated in an electric atmosphere, marked by deputies who left the hemicycle on several occasions.
The “government is already dead in the eyes of the French”, launched the president of the group La France Insoumise (LFI, radical left) Mathilde Panot, after the vote of the narrowly rejected motion.
For their part, far-right deputies (RN) denounced the “slump” and “stagnation” of the executive.
The left has submitted to the Constitutional Council a request for a referendum of shared initiative, a procedure that must collect 4.87 million signatures to allow the organization of a referendum.
Ms. Borne, who spoke Monday evening with President Macron, for her part said she was “determined to continue to bring about the necessary transformations”.
Its services indicated that it would seize “directly the Constitutional Council” for an examination “as soon as possible” of the text.
After two months of consultations and an intense union and popular mobilization against the project, the forced passage of the executive with the use of 49.3 had been vilified by the opposition.
Since January 19, hundreds of thousands of French people have demonstrated eight times to express their rejection of the reform. Opponents consider it “unfair”, especially for women and workers in arduous jobs.
From the podium in the Assembly on Monday, the Prime Minister denounced the “unleashing of violence” by certain left-wing deputies, while adding that she was “well aware of the current state of mind” of the country and of the “effort that this reform “demands of many” of his “compatriots”.
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 delay the retirement age to respond to the financial deterioration of pension funds and the aging of the population.
Many analysts believe that this reform and the protest it has brought about will leave an indelible mark on Emmanuel Macron’s second five-year term.
After the rejection of the motion of censure, a few hundred people, joined by LFI deputies, first gathered not far from the National Assembly, before being channeled by the police.
Throughout the evening, in small groups, the demonstrators wandered in the center of the capital, overturning electric scooters and bicycles in their path, or setting fire to garbage cans that pile up on the sidewalks of many neighborhoods, collecting garbage remaining disturbed despite the requisitions ordered by the prefect.
They were not looking for confrontation with the police, according to AFP journalists on the spot, but rather to engage in a game of cat and mouse. Security forces repeatedly used tear gas.
“We hear that young people are not mobilized. Here we are. This is for pensions and for the rest. It’s a whole, an accumulation, “explained to AFP a student wishing to remain anonymous, the demonstration not being declared.
The same scenes were repeated in several large cities, such as Strasbourg (east), Lyon (southeast) or Rennes (west).
A new day of strikes and demonstrations is scheduled for Thursday at the call of the unions, which continue to demand the withdrawal of the text.
Due to the strike in the refineries which hardens, many service stations are dry, mainly in the south-east of the country, for the first time since the beginning of the conflict.
