Macron’s pension reform decree exacerbates the crisis in France

Paris burned Thursday night and France is engulfed in a brutal political and social crisis, with unpredictable results and profound radicalisation . The government’s decision to approve the pension reform at the age of 64 without a vote in Parliament and the application of the 49.3 (constitutional provision), as a presidential decree, has radicalized the country and crossed the political parties.

Government appears isolated, weakened and with the threat of a no-confidence vote to be voted on Monday, which could end the management of Prime Minister Elizabeth Borne.

This Friday protests continued inside the country and have cut the Periphery, which surrounds the French capital. A ninth day of mobilization was announced for 23 March. There will be mobilizations this weekend because they believe that reform will be achieved as “a democratic denial”.

At least 3,000 young people gathered again on the Place de la Concorde on Friday evening as the Legislative Assembly was surrounded by security forces. A fire was organized by young people in front of the police. The rain didn’t stop them from scattering.

arrived on black blocs, dressed in black and with their faces covered, while anger grew in the streets and in the main provincial capitals. Police charged them with tear gas and a water truck tried to disperse the crowd.

The first Thursday night was a wild and unauthorized protest. Then came the violence. Water cannons, tear gas, hand-to-hand clashes with the police, bullfights and fires. A gloomy scenery in front of the National Assembly in the middle of the anger and disappointment.

Dozens of busloads of passengers and vehicles stranded on the Champs-Élysées due to fires and repression. Terrified tourists seek refuge in bars that have closed their doors.

70 percent of French people, regardless of political lines, oppose this pension reform for those who postpone their retirement to 64 years. 56 percent oppose the application of provision 49.3. Six thousand people gathered outside the Assembly when Prime Minister Borne, a technocrat, announced the application of 49.3.

In black paint, two young men wrote on the wooden walls of a construction site on the Place de la Concorde: “King boy, get out.” “Macron, dictator”.

Everything was on fire, favored by the garbage cans of a week of strike and the plastic barriers, which the mayor distributed throughout the city to block off roads and install bike lanes.

Garbage bins have overflowed the streets after a week-long strike.

It was the first day of spring and the Parisians defied the electric rationing of the shop windows. They settled on café terraces discussing the crisis while their city was in chaos, with one hell of a traffic jam to escape the area.

This Friday the situation extends to the whole country. Thousands of people walk on the train tracks in Toulon and in the south of the country. The Periphery surrounding Paris is cut off at the Clignancourt gate. No one can pass. People spontaneously go to the squares of big cities. At the Gare de Lyon, the main train station in Paris to the south, reels of cable are burning. In Nantes they have strengthened the police. It is aimed at Rennes, at Bordeaux, at Lille.

The CGT, the second largest trade union in France, has called for general action and to organize barriers at access points to Paris: the Porte Italie, Clignancourt and Montreuil,” it announced in a statement.

The Normandie Total refinery He stopped and is the largest in France. The measures of force will be felt while the protest against the application of 49.3 becomes more radical and wants to force the government to go back.

In Dijon, mannequins with the faces of members of the government they were burned in the public square last night. There were the faces of Emmanuel Macron, Prime Minister Borne, spokesman Olivier Veran on the Place de la République in the Burgundy capital.

“GREAT VIOLENCE”

Interior Minister Gérald Darmanian described on Friday morning “the enormous violence” on the “symbols of the state”, “the parliamentary residences in the interior of the country, the houses of the prefects”. He mentioned Albi, Marseille, Nantes, Rennes and the blackout at the home of deputy Bruno Retailleau.

When MPs called for protection against threats, the minister said : “To touch a parliamentarian is to touch the republic”. He said “the police and the gendarmerie are there to protect the chosen people”.

“The opposition is legitimate, the demonstrations are legitimate. Bordel or the “bordelisation” of violence is not,” the interior minister announced.

This morning the requisitions began for the garbage collectors to start collecting the rubbish, which has turned Paris into an unhealthy city. The government accuses Mayor Anne Hidalgo of not having “willed to take on her responsibilities”. It is the prefect of police, Laurent Nuñez, who executed him.

ISOLATED GOVERNMENT

The government appears isolated, weakened, blocked and without a glorious way out. The motion of censure will be dealt with on Monday. And it is proposed by a group of 20 independent deputies, to which all the other parties have joined, who have lowered theirs.

Macron threatens to dissolve Parliament. The result is that Marine Le Pen can win, the Prime Minister can fall and blow himself up in the crisis. Anger crosses parties and generations.

It is all chaos in a badly communicated reform, badly negotiated with the trade unionists, who voted Macron to win the second presidential round in the face of Le Pen’s advance and today feel betrayed.

Macron was given the chance to negotiate with moderate social democratic unions because the CGT lost strength. He refused, he didn’t receive them. Letters were exchanged, as King Charles of Great Britain likes. Today the head of state has no strength and does not have a third mandate. But he will leave a France more fractured than ever, in a socio-political crisis worse than that of the yellow vests and with the possibility of being recovered by the xenophobic populism of Marine Le Pen.

Macron argues that if he doesn’t extend the legal retirement age to 64, the boxes will be empty and he won’t be able to finance the distribution system that works in France. He wanted to avoid this decline.

But his intentions ended in a political fiasco, which in a narcissist like the French president will cloud his historical legacy. His victory “is like Pyrrhus” and in it he made serious errors of analysis. Not even the morning before the vote did he been able to count on the necessary votes for its approval e immolated his prime minister in the application of 49.3.

“We are tired”, exclaimed Bertand Pancher, president of the Liot group of independent deputies in the Assembly, who presented a motion of censure against the Government after the use of 49.3 on the text of the pension reform.

“We voted on the motion of no confidence that Emmanuel Macron withdraw this text”, he added, “because it makes good sense”. In particular, he highlighted the strong opposition of the entire population to this reform.

Conservative Republicans, who for years defended reform at age 65, were divided on it and have now been left between splintering or dissolution.

Nupes, the party of Jean Luc Melenchon, which has abused parliamentary obstructionism, has abandoned the motion of no confidence to support that of independent deputies, as did Marine Le Pen. In France there is a dangerous political disintegration and a revolt unpredictable and dangerous.