Frënch protests, turning viölent, aim to override Macron’s pension model
By Story Agencies, March 21, 2023President Emmanuel Macron of France might have circumvented Parliament in passing his contentious pension overhaul, but there remains a large constituency—millions of street protesters—who contend they have final say in the matter.
Protest movements have long been the final arbiter, albeit an unofficial one, of France’s political system, bringing successive governments to their knees and forcing previous presidents to abandon or even rescind legislation protesters oppose.
That is why thousands of protesters have streamed into public squares across France since Macron exercised Article 49 of the constitution to raise France’s retirement age to 64 from 62 by 2030 without the consent of Parliament.
Garbage piles Over the weekend, protesters set fire to piles of garbage in Paris that had accumulated from a two-week trash-collectors strike, leading police to use tear gas and water cannons to disperse those who had gathered on Saturday evening.
Protesters also gathered and clashed with police in cities including Bordeaux, Nantes and Brest in what has become a nightly ritual since Macron imposed his overhaul. Behind the scenes of violence lies a strategy: Turn up the protests and turn the screws on lawmakers and other officials until they force Macron to reverse course.
An early test will come Monday when the National Assembly is expected to hold votes of no-confidence that, if passed, would kill the legislation and force Macron’s ministers to resign. The noconfidence votes face an uphill battle, because Macron’s party holds a plurality of seats and Les Républicains—the establishment conservative party that holds the balance of power in the chamber—is loath to foment further political instability. Unions have vowed to keep mobilizing protesters regardless of how the vote goes.
“We don’t know why the government and especially the president didn’t take our warnings seriously,” Philippe Martinez, head of the far-left CGT union, said on French television on Sunday morning. “This reform is unfair, it’s brutal, it’s authoritarian.”
The offices of Eric Ciotti, head of the Les Républicains, were smashed with rocks this weekend in Nice, along the French Riviera. A warning scrawled on the office’s facade threatened, “The motion or the cobblestone,” according to a photo Ciotti posted to Twitter on Sunday.
“I will never give in to these new disciples of terror,” Ciotti said.
French protests have a long history of forcing change, stretching all the way back to Parisians’ storming of the Bastille prison in 1789 at the start of the French Revolution. –