Paris French unions are ramping up their protests against President Emmanuel Macron’s pension reforms. On Tuesday, they want to bring “France to a standstill” with walkouts and road blockades, according to the announcement. In some areas, such as rail transport, indefinite strikes are planned that could last for days or even weeks.
A majority of French support the protest movement against a gradual increase in the statutory retirement age from 62 to 64. However, the left-wing parties close to the trade unions did not benefit politically from this. Instead, Marine Le Pen’s right-wing Rassemblement National has used the chaotic parliamentary debates on pensions to present itself as a credible and serious opposition force.
While French confidence in Macron and his government is falling, Le Pen’s popularity is on the rise. In a survey by the Institut Kantar for the newspaper “Le Figaro”, trust levels for the President fell by five points from February to March to just 30 percent. Over the same period, the proportion of respondents who would like Le Pen to play a more important role in the future rose five points to 35 percent.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, spokesman for the Left Alliance, improved only slightly to 19 percent. According to the information, Le Pen’s popularity also increased among French people, who are politically very left-wing. In the Kantar survey, 33 percent say they have a “good opinion” of the Rassemblement National – the highest level for a political party in France. Macron’s alliance is 25 percent.
Other surveys confirm the trend: In a survey by the Ifop Institute, 41 percent said that Le Pen best embodied the opposition to Macron. Mélenchon, on the other hand, only got a value of 23 percent. French political magazine Le Point asked: “Is the Rassemblement National the big winner of the pension debate?”
Macron’s government wants to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64.
(Photo: dpa)
For years, Marine Le Pen has been trying to shed the extreme right-wing image that the party, formerly known as the Front National, had under her father Jean-Marie Le Pen. The strategy of winning over new groups of voters through a more moderate demeanor seems to be working: in the presidential elections in 2022, Le Pen again contested the runoff against Macron and achieved her best result to date.
>> Read here: Worse than Brexit: what a President Le Pen would mean for Europe
The pension discussion is the next act of this reinvention: The Rassemblement National strictly rejects Macron’s policy, but the MPs adopt a state-supporting tone and appear in the parliamentary debates in bourgeois suits and ties.
Their demeanor differed from that of the noisy representatives of left-wing populist Mélenchon’s Indomitable France party. The party dominates the left-wing alliance forged with the Socialists and the Greens. The indomitables triggered riots in parliament on several occasions. Among other things, Labor Minister Olivier Dussopt was insulted from their ranks as a “murderer” because of the pension reform.
Chaotic debates in Parliament
The New People’s Ecological and Social Union (Nupes), as the Left Alliance was called, flooded the proceedings in the National Assembly with thousands of amendments. As a result, only three of the 20 articles of the law could be dealt with during the two-week debate in the more important of the two chambers of parliament. The deputies also did not discuss the passage with the increase in the retirement age.
“Macron didn’t get what he wanted: a vote by the National Assembly to retire at 64,” said Mélenchon. The left-wing alliance’s strategy is apparently to cast doubt on the parliamentary legitimacy of the pension reform – and thus to give the street protests even greater weight.
>> Read here: That’s why Macron has to push through his controversial pension reform this year – one comment
However, the actions of the left-wing opposition were not necessarily well received in the trade union camp. The head of the moderate trade union CFDT complained about a “pathetic spectacle” in the National Assembly, which is at the expense of the working class.
The unions have called for another nationwide strike on Tuesday.
(Photo: IMAGO/ZUMA Wire)
In any case, Mélenchon and his fellow campaigners will ultimately not be able to prevent the law from being passed in parliament. Pension reform is currently being discussed in the upper house of parliament, the Senate. Both chambers must then agree on a joint version before the law goes back to the National Assembly for a vote. There, a majority of Macron’s governing center alliance and the conservative-bourgeois Republicans for the reform is considered likely.
Unions want to extend strikes
The foreseeable defeat of the reform opponents in parliament strengthens the unions in their will to overturn Macron’s pension plans with the resistance of the street. After five days of nationwide protests since January, during which more than a million people took to the streets, the strikes are to be significantly expanded. The hardliner union CGT threatened the government with a “black week”.
Truck drivers are said to block roads on Tuesday, construction workers to stop working, and schools and universities to remain closed. In the transport and energy sectors, unions are threatening to continue walkouts beyond Tuesday. “We have to shift up a gear,” said CGT boss Philippe Martinez in an interview.
More: Prime Minister Borne is Macron’s “shield” in the pension dispute