Laurent Berger, secretary general of the CFDT, judged on Sunday on the set of LCI that the spectacle of the debates in the Assembly on the pension reform was “lamentable”, in opposition to the “dignity” present at the demonstrations in the street.
“It’s a lamentable spectacle that has nothing to do with the dignity of the street movement,” lamented Laurent Berger, guest of the RTL-Le Figaro-LCI grand jury this Sunday. The latter even compared the scenes that have taken place in recent days to “Cyril Hanouna’s set”.
In the Assembly, the first week of examination of the text of the pension reform, already stormy, ended in the tumult of a controversy resulting in the exclusion for 15 days of the deputy LFI Thomas Portes, sanctioned for having posed, in a tweet, the foot on a ball with the effigy of the Minister of Labor Olivier Dussopt.
The unions are demanding that Article 7, which relates to the retirement age measure, be subject to debate and a vote. But nothing is less certain, while the deputies of the Nupes have tabled thousands of amendments. “Obstruction is not a good solution,” commented Mr. Berger. “It’s bullshit,” he added.
A battle over the counting of protesters
Laurent Berger also challenged the official count of protesters against the reform on Saturday. According to the Ministry of the Interior, the demonstrations gathered 963,000 people in France, including 93,000 in Paris. The CGT has identified for its part 500,000 people in the Parisian procession, and “more than 2.5 million” at the national level. “The Interior figure is reduced because there were more than a million people on the street,” said Laurent Berger.
“We have our own count: 1.8 million people, we have people who count (the demonstrators) in each meeting place,” he said. “We can play on the numbers but it’s a huge mobilization: never have there been so many people in a mobilization on Saturday,” he continued.
The inter-union calls for a fifth act on February 16 and raises the specter of a “France at a standstill” on March 7, after the school holidays. “It can be like in Spain where traders lower the curtain symbolically for an hour or two,” said Laurent Berger.