The proposal to reform France’s pension system, which has sparked mass protests and strikes since the start of the year, will be put to a vote in parliament today – a defining moment for President Emmanuel Macron.
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The Senate and the lower house of the National Assembly are to hold votes on the law for raising the retirement age to 64 yearswith Macron’s minority government dependent on the support of the opposition Republicans (LR) party.
After months of negotiations, “everyone wants the moment of truth to come,” a senior representative of Macron’s Renaissance party told AFP on condition of anonymity. He admitted that there was a risk that “we could lose”.
Support in the upper house of the Senate seems almost certain, but a majority will be harder to find in a fractured Assembly and ultimate victory or defeat may come down to a handful of votes.
“In my group, as well as in the ruling party, there are some lawmakers who do not want to vote for this reform,” the top GOP lawmaker in the Assembly, Olivier Marlay, admitted Wednesday night.
The government has argued that raising the retirement age, removing privileges for some public sector workers and tightening the criteria for receiving a full pension are necessary to prevent the accumulation of large deficits.
If Prime Minister Elizabeth Bourne fails to find a working majority in parliament on Thursday, she can use the power contained in in Article 49(3) of the constitution, which allows her to push the law through without a vote.
However, pushing it through by decree like this would strip her and Macron of democratic legitimacy and expose the government to a confidence vote it could lose, analysts say.
“We don’t want 49.3,” government spokesman Olivier Veran said on Sunday. “We want a positive vote for this bill.”
The French are protesting in a last-ditch effort to stop pension reform
The final vote on the bill takes place tomorrow
Macron met Bourne and senior ministers for final talks on Wednesday night to discuss strategy ahead of what could be a vote a turning point for his second term.
If the reform is voted in, one of the questions will be whether unions and demonstrators will continue their protests and strikes, or whether the movement will fizzle out, something that has been seen in previous standoffs with unions.
“This is the last cry of workers who say they don’t want to retire at 64,” CFDT union leader Laurent Berget, who joined a march on amid nationwide protests on Wednesday.
The political consequences of voting for a reform opposed by the majority of the population are also uncertain for Macron and the country as a whole.
Far-right leader Marine Le Pen and far-left populist Jean-Luc Melenchon hoping to capitalize on Macron’s unpopularity.
Unions have resisted the plans since the start of the year, staging some of the biggest demonstrations in decades, culminating last Tuesday when an estimated 1.28 million people took to the streets.
They claim that the reform will hurt low-income peoplemanual laborers who typically start their careers early, and will force them to work longer than graduates who are less affected by the changes.
As a result of the strike by municipal garbage collectors in Paris in the last week, about 7,000 tons of uncollected waste have piled up on the streets, attracting rats and disturbing tourists.
The strike, which affected about half of the city’s areas, was extended until March 20, and private waste collection company Derichebourg carried out emergency collections in some of the worst-affected areas.
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But Derichebourg said on Wednesday it would stop intervening after strikers threatened “to block the entrances and exits to our site if we continue to collect for health reasons which are legitimate”, company chief executive Thomas Derichebourg told AFP.
Although Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin urged Paris city officials to order workers back to work for health reasons, Socialist Mayor Anne Hidalgo refused, writing on Wednesday that protests are “just”.
Elsewhere, workers from the CFE-CGC union in southern France said on Wednesday they had cut power to the presidential island in the Mediterranean used by Macron for his summer vacation.
In the last six weeks strikes affected trains, schools, public services and ports.
Opinion polls show that two-thirds of the French are against the pension reform and support the protest movement.
