Macron government survives but faces wrath from France over withdrawal changes

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PARIS – The French National Assembly on Monday rejected a motion of no confidence against the president’s government Emmanuel Macron, ensure that a hotly contested bill raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 becomes law.

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The first of the two motions received 278 votes, nine fewer than the 287 needed to pass.

A protester kicks a French police tear gas canister.  (AP Photo/Daniel Cole)

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A protester kicks a French police tear gas canister. (AP Photo/Daniel Cole)

The narrow result reflects widespread anger at the pension reform, at Macron at his apparent ousting and at the way the measure passed parliament last week without a full vote on the bill itself.

The Senate, the upper house of the French parliament, approved the pensions bill this month.

A second no-confidence motion, tabled by the far-right National Association, also failed on Monday, with just 94 MPs voting in favour.

The change, which Macron has been seeking since the start of his first term in 2017, has sparked two months of demonstrations, intermittent strikes and lawsuits of violenceHe.

It has divided France, with polls consistently showing it two-thirds of the population opposes the revision.

After Monday’s voting, there were no signs that the protests were about to subside or that the unrest caused by this crisis would soon subside.

France faces a period of deep uncertaintyand it is not clear how Macron, who remained silent, will be able to assert his authority.

“Through strikes and demonstrations, we have to force the withdrawal of the bill,” he said. Jean-Luc Melenchon, the far-left leader, after the vote.

As night fell, sporadic violent clashes broke out between crowds of protesters and police in cities across the country, including Strasbourg, Rennes and Lyon. In Paris, small groups of protesters played cat-and-mouse with the police, overturning trash cans and setting fire to uncollected rubbish.

Riot police responded with tear gas, pepper spray and batons.

The unions have announced a day of strikes and demonstrations for Thursday Marine Le PenAgrupacion Nacional party leader said:

“I think it’s difficult to govern in these circumstances.”

French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne (left) talks with the president of the

French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne (left) talks with the president of the ‘Horizons’ parliamentary group, Edouard Philippe (right), before a meeting with the group’s deputies at the National Assembly in Paris. (Photo by Anne-Christine POUJOULAT / POOL / AFP)

But for now the center-right has held and the fall of the government has been averted.

Before the vote, in a speech of fierce indignation, Elizabeth Bornethe Prime Minister, denounced the legislators who “deny the role of Parliament and affirm that the street is more legitimate than our institutions”.

Clearly addressing both the far right and far left, who have spearheaded the opposition to the pension review, he accused them of a “paroxysm“of anti-parliamentary and anti-democratic behaviour.

The question of who can undermine French democracy is now hotly contested.

Last week, instead of putting the reform to a vote in the National Assembly, the lower house of parliament, as he had said he would, Macron opted for a measure, known as 49.3 by the related article of the Constitution, which allows the approval of some bills without a vote.

But it exposes the government to motions of censure, such as those presented on Monday.

This was the eleventh time in less than a year since the French government resorted to clause 49.3., sparking a growing sense among Macron’s opponents that the country’s democratic process had been bypassed, even though the move is legal under the Fifth Republic’s constitution , designed to create theto the almighty presidency what did he want Charles de Gaulle.

Charles de Courson, an independent MP from the group that tabled the first no-confidence vote, told Borne ahead of the vote:

“They failed to unite, they failed to convince”.

And he added that passing the bill last week without a full parliamentary vote was against the “spirit of the Constitution”.

Indeed, Macron’s maneuver was totally constitutional.

But some lawmakers have vowed to challenge the new law before France’s Constitutional Council, which reviews legislation to ensure it complies with the constitution.

It’s unclear how the Council will ultimately decide, nor what parts of the law it might override, if at all.

So far, the government has expressed confidence that the core of the law will stick.

In the end, the votes of the center-right Republicans – who last year had proposed to further raise the retirement age to 65 – were just enough to save the law and Borne’s government.

With 61 seats, the party maintained its balance in the National Assembly.

But 19 of its lawmakers, more than expected, voted in favor of the motion of no confidence, rejecting the indications of their party leader.

As they spoke to their constituents over the weekend, some Republicans began defecting.

One lawmaker, Maxime Minot, said he had to vote in order to “preserve the trust of the administration”.

Another, Aurélien Pradié, spoke of the “contempt“shown by the government.

Such decisions by moderate conservatives made the outcome uncomfortably close for Macron.

But he stood his ground:

For him, disrespect for the French people consists in perpetuating, at the cost of a growing debt, a unsustainable system.

He argued that retirement at 62 could not be sustained as life expectancy lengthened.

The math, at least in the long run, simply didn’t add up, as the ratio of active workers to retirees they supported through payroll taxes continued to decline.

“If we don’t solve the problem of our retirees, we won’t be able to invest in the rest,” Macron said last year.

“It’s nothing more than a choice of the company we want.”

Now Macron, more than four years into his mandate and unable to run for re-election in 2027, believes he has laid the foundations for the huge investments in defence, green energy, schools and technology essential to France’s future.

But he is facing a country more hostile than ever to his government.

The protests appear to mark Macron’s second term, just as the Yellow Vest protest movement did its first.

Behind both moves is a resentment against the president’s perceived elitism, compounding anger at the specific measures that sparked the protests.

Macron’s decision not to put the bill to a vote in Parliament reinforced the impression of a top-down approach.

In recent weeks, he had refused to meet union leaders, which angered them.

Before the vote, Le Pen, who ran against Macron twice in a presidential election and lost, told BFMTV:

“The government has been playing with matches in a gas station for months.”

After the vote, he told reporters that the government had “dodged a bullet”.

The rationale for pensions to change, at a time when people are living longer and most European states raised the retirement age to 65 and beyond, hasn’t been convincing to many French people fiercely attached to the country’s dear work-life balance.

They didn’t see the urgency of the measure at a time of rising inflation and multiple economic pressures stemming from the war in Ukraine.

The pension system is not on the verge of bankruptcy, even if its medium-term finances look pitiful.

Many French people perceive the imposition of a longer working life as an attack on the social solidarity at the heart of the French model and a maneuver of the rich to bring France closer to the rampant capitalism they associate with the United States.

But another, calmer France saw things differently.

Aurore Bergé, the leader of Macron’s Renaissance party, told the National Assembly that reviewing Macron’s pensions “required courage” because asking the French to work longer is “always more difficult” than making promises “with money we don’t have.”

As a result of virtually unlimited spending of Macron to help the French overcome the COVID-19 pandemic, France’s public debt, which amounted to 98.1% of gross domestic product in 2017, increased to 113.4% in the third quarter of 2022.

The president was doubly convinced, under these circumstances, that retirement at 62 was an unsustainable leftover from another era.

Macron is likely to address the nation in the coming days in a bid to promote the reconciliation.

He is a persuasive speaker, but since he is unable to re-elect, the succession maneuvers have clearly begun, especially by Le Pen, the leader of the nationalist anti-immigration party who always bides his time.

“Mr Macron cares very little about the democratic functioning of the country,” he said on Monday.

But it is precisely because so many French see him as a danger to democratic stability and the rule of law that Macron he defeated her twice.

Two electoral victories showed that firing Macron is often foolish.

Both the 2024 Paris Olympics and the planned reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral next year, after the devastating fire of 2019, could offer him opportunities to revive his battered fortune.

c.2023 The New York Times Society

Source: Clarin

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