(Paris) Emmanuel Macron excluded Tuesday in front of his troops the most radical options to relaunch his five-year term after the forceps adoption of his pension reform, still contested in the street, and before breaking his silence Wednesday on television.
The Head of State will be live on Tuesday evening on TF1 and France 2 for a long-awaited interview as a climate of crisis has won the country.
Her second five-year term already appears to be hampered after less than a year: on Monday, the adoption of her flagship reform was painful and the government of Elisabeth Borne narrowly survived a cross-partisan motion of censure in the Assembly national.
On Tuesday, President Macron received the Prime Minister, accompanied by several ministers, as well as the leaders of his relative majority.
Several participants in this meeting assured AFP that the Head of State had no intention of dissolving the Assembly, reshuffling the government, or calling a referendum on the reform pushing back the age of retirement from age 62 to 64. The option of withdrawing the text, demanded by the unions and the opponents, was also ruled out.
According to one of these participants, he asked his troops to make “within two to three weeks” “proposals” for a “change of method and agenda of reforms”.
Emmanuel Macron then had lunch with Yaël Braun-Pivet and Gérard Larcher, presidents of the Assembly and the Senate, before a meeting which began in the evening with the parliamentarians of his camp.
Elisabeth Borne also chained the meetings, after having claimed, in the Elysian closed door, that the adoption of the text in pain was despite everything a “victory”.
“The Prime Minister is the only one, and our majority is the only one, who can carry out a government project today,” assured Olivier Véran, government spokesperson.
In the immediate future, after new spontaneous demonstrations often enamelled with tensions on Monday evening, the protest continues almost everywhere in France.
Several hundred people gathered in the early evening of Tuesday Place de la République, determined to “keep up the pressure”. Earlier, a demonstration had brought together several hundred students opposed to the reform.
In Lille, there were also several hundred again gathered at Place de la République. “Strikes, blockades, wild demonstrations! “, “Manu, your reform, 49.3 or not we do not want it”, chanted the demonstrators who were heading south of the city.
Nearly 300 people were arrested Monday evening, including 234 in Paris. “Improper arrests,” protested La France insoumise coordinator Manuel Bombard, in unison with the rest of the left.
The police “have a duty to set an example”, replied Elisabeth Borne to the Assembly, while paying them “homage”.
In addition to the renewable garbage collectors’ strike in several cities including Paris, around 12% of service stations in France have run out of petrol or diesel and 6% have run out.
Incidents erupted Tuesday in front of the oil depot of Fos-sur-Mer, near Marseille, where the authorities proceeded to the first requisitions of personnel on strike against the reform.
“Nothing undermines the determination of the workers,” warned the CGT, before a new day of action on Thursday, at the call of all the unions.
Less than 48 hours from this new mobilization, the RATP foresees “very disrupted” traffic in the transport of the capital and its inner suburbs. Ditto for trains at the national level, for the SNCF.
CFDT Secretary General Laurent Berger said he was worried about the “anger” and “violence” that could be expressed as a result of the adoption of a law that had “no majority in the Assembly “.
Political offices have been degraded, including those of Les Républicains (LR) in Amiens, of Horizons deputy for Marne Xavier Albertini in Reims or of his LR counterpart Xavier Breton in Ain.
According to Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, “more than 1,200” undeclared, “sometimes violent” demonstrations have taken place across the country since Thursday. He announced that “12,000 police and gendarmes” would be mobilized in France on Thursday, including “5,000 in Paris”.
Politically, too, the pressure does not fall, after the use of 49.3 to pass the reform without a vote.
The rejection of the motion of censure by only nine votes gave energy to the opposition.
The 19 Republican MPs who voted to bring down the government despite their group’s opposing position will not be excluded.
On the left, LFI deputy Alexis Corbière called on Emmanuel Macron not to “repeat a kind of verbal 49.3” by returning “to say the same thing”. In a column in the Sunday newspaper, 2,500 elected socialists asked the head of state to withdraw his reform.
The left is also asking for a shared initiative referendum (RIP), the admissibility of which the Elders must examine.
It also relies on the Constitutional Council, seized of the reform. The National Rally filed its own appeal on Tuesday to have this text “put in the trash” and Marine Le Pen warned that she would not participate in “putting out the fire” of the protest.
In an interview with Les Échos, Medef boss Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux called on the executive to “rely on a different method” for the next social reforms which will have to “be further discussed and negotiated upstream with the social partners”.
