Up to 100,000 participants were expected in Paris alone. According to the police, around 230 demonstrations around France were known in advance.
in France demonstrated again on Saturday against the unpopular pension reform. Estimates of the number of participants in the protests had not yet been given by early Saturday evening, but in advance the police believed that up to a million people could participate in the protests nationwide.
Up to 100,000 participants were expected in Paris alone. According to the police, around 230 demonstrations around France were known in advance.
“I am here to fight for my colleagues and our youth,” said the retired locomotive driver Claude Jeanvoine In Strasbourg for the news agency AFP.
President Emmanuel Macron the reform implemented would raise the minimum retirement age from the current 62 years to 64. In many of France’s EU neighboring countries, the lower limit has already been raised to 65 years or even higher. In addition, the reform would tighten the conditions for receiving a full pension and remove some of the special benefits enjoyed by public sector employees.
As a counterweight to the reductions, the reform would envisage increases to the level of the lowest pensions.
Reformation was initially marketed by modifying the pension system to make it fairer, but since then the government has started talking more and more about savings.
“The current situation will lead to a deficit of 150 billion euros within the next 10 years and a decrease in the standard of living of pensioners”, Minister of Labor Olivier Dussopt has described the situation.
According to the trade unions, the reform would penalize uneducated workers who start working early and often do physically demanding work, in contrast to, for example, university graduates. According to the Ay people, the deficits that threaten the system could be offset by small increases in pension payments instead of raising the retirement age.
The parties supporting the resistance are the Socialists, the Greens and the left-wing LFI, of which the latter would, on the contrary, want to lower the current retirement age to 60 years. The national coalition on the extreme right of the party map also opposes the reform, although the intentions of the trade unions to paralyze the country with roving strikes worry the party.
Strikes despite the extensive adverse effects, clearly more than half of the French support the strikers and the trade union movement. On the other hand, even two-thirds of the citizens believe that the reform will go through in the end.
Macron’s centrist LREM party no longer has a majority in parliament, but should be able to count on the support of the centre-right Republican Party.
In the upper house of the parliament, the senate, a key piece of the law on raising the retirement age was approved in a vote earlier this week. However, the processing of the matter returns to the lower chamber, the National Assembly, where it was previously left unfinished.
Before that, the joint group of both chambers must find an agreement on the final legal text with changes. The final vote on the pension reform is planned for the last week of March.
of the Cevipof Research Institute researcher Jerome Jaffren canceling the reform would be extremely difficult and unlikely.
“I don’t think that even the leaders of the resistance believe in this,” Jaffre said in an interview with LCI television earlier this week.
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