2023-04-17 10:00:00
The French are the protagonists of one of the most massive protests against the pension reform promoted by President Emmanuel Macron
Paraphrasing the title of Hemingway’s famous novel, Paris, Now it’s not a party, the streets of the City of Light have been continuously submerged in chaos for weeks with the protests of millions of people for the reform of the pension system promoted by President Emmanuel Macron. As a joke, many say that protesting against the government is a Parisian tradition, but so is the interest of successive French leaders to include changes in their pension system, considered a source of national pride.
The French retirement and social assistance payment is conceived in what experts call “solidarity between generations”, which allows the economically active population to pay a mandatory tax to finance retirees; this allows all citizens to receive a state pension, which also receives state budgets. In the heat of the current controversy, several French and European media outlets and agencies point out that a high percentage of the inhabitants of that nation are in favor of this system, which has undergone transformations in the last four decades without losing its essence.
However, Macron and his cabinet considered that this model would mean that in a few years it would be economically unsustainable and would threaten its stability. To alleviate the situation, he proposed raising the general minimum retirement age from 62 to 64 years (France has the lowest among the developed countries in the European region), the loss of privileges for public sector workers and the increase in the number of minimum years required to access a full retirement pension. It was like throwing gasoline on a campfire. However, it is not the first time that he has spoken about the matter. In 2019 he advanced some issues and made it a point of his campaign in the 2022 elections, where he was re-elected. He now comes for all, to such an extent that, faced with the danger that the Senate and the National Assembly would not approve his bill, he made use of a constitutional prerogative and skipped the vote. The left-wing bench in the National Assembly sang the Marseillaise when the Prime Minister, Élisabeth Borne, announced the decision, but this did not prevent the Government from advancing in its objectives.
The situation has political connotations for Paris, which until now had been stable in the face of the wave of protests in several European countries and the dizzying rise of the extreme right. French analysts and politicians affirm that the government coalition, Renacimiento, is now not only at a numerical disadvantage in the legislative chambers, but has also lost the power to maneuver to establish alliances with other political groups, which will prevent furthering Macron’s other objectives in his second term. This situation could lead to the dissolution of the current cabinet and even to the calling of parliamentary elections, something that is considered more unlikely.
The fact that Macron has resorted to a controversial constitutional article that allows him to ignore the parliamentary vote to impose a law deeply hurt public opinion and political forces, who consider the act an attack on the soul of French democracy, which is It prides itself on being a world reference. Meanwhile, the far-right Marine Le Pen, a finalist in the 2022 electoral contest, has taken advantage of the situation that leverages her criticism of the national democratic system and brings her closer, due to the whims of life, to the interests of the French left, which, Although at a political level he would never accept a coalition with the extreme right, he could lose a large number of voters who would move towards this sign in the upcoming elections.
COVER CREDIT
Emmanuel Macron has been trying since 2019 to make changes to the French pension system. /theguardian.com
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