After a day of protests and rampage in France, unions try to negotiate with Emmanuel Macron

One day after one of the most violent and populous May Day mobilizations in its history in France, this time against the pension reform and the working model, some allies of Emmanuel Macron’s government are calling for reconciliation. Images of the destruction and fires in Paris on Monday sent chills through the political establishment.

The pension reform is not definitively resolved: it was adopted by Parliament and promulgated in mid-morning.

But the Constitutional Council must pronounce possibility of consultative referendum, so it needs to collect 4 million signatures. The decision will be adopted next Wednesday, while the dialogue between the government and the unions has already begun.

François Bayrou, president of MODEM and adviser to the president, called for “a phase of reconciliation and healing”. According to him, “the pension reform has been poorly explained” and calls for “a change in the method of government”. At the same time, he reports that the unions are willing to talk.

But the crisis will cause the government’s other plans to slip, like the immigration law, because the French don’t want decisions taken away from them. They want more Parliament and less Elysee.

another march in June

The Intersindical has organized another march for June 6th. It will accompany the LIOT parliamentary group’s proposal to repeal the law. A survey of conservative newspapers i get themafter the Labor Day rally, he said 51.87 percent of respondents said “the government won’t win pension reform,” versus 48.13 percent who believe they can enforce it.

The law has been passed but, as President Jacques Chirac did with the first labor decree of Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin after the great demonstrations in Paris, he first passed it and then canceled it, in the name of social peace.

Painfully voted and promulgated, the pension reform is not yet ready to be implemented. Because not all of its parameters are fixed: about thirty decrees have yet to specify some measures of the reform. Indispensable for its implementation by the pension funds, they will all be “published in the summer”, says the Ministry of Labour.

Some have already been “transmitted, both to the various bodies to be consulted and to the legal department to be able to verify them”, according to Minister Olivier Dussopt.

A tight schedule, while The reform is to be applied on 1 September. Enough to make the unions say that the game is not over yet. Firstly because some of them hope to be able to influence the content of these decrees, which must specify in particular the revaluation of minimum pensions, renamed by the Executive as the “sweetness of the reform”.

But also the measures relating to the consideration of hardships, exceptions to the legal age established for long careers, among others.

The crisis, against Macron

The crisis is not against the government but directly against President Emmanuel Macron. Against him are the pans. The French don’t want to hear it anymore. It is personal, cruel, irremediable and 4 years away from government. “Macron’s resignation” was the most heard slogan during the march.

There were 2.3 million French people marching across the country against the reform. One of the most important mobilizations in history.

But in Paris, Rennes, Nantes, the demonstration has been co-opted by the violence of the Black Bloc anarchistsin a disturbing setting, with the fires on Boulevard Voltaire and the newly modeled Place de la Nation.

Protesters distinguish the violent by their pension demands: “They’re infiltrators,” they say. But the CGT warns against “radicalization if there is no dialogue”.

There were 540 detainees, 406 injured gendarmes and in Paris alone 259 members of the security forces are injured. An attempted murder case has been opened against the perpetrators of an attack on a police officer with a Molotov cocktail, which left him seriously injured, with second-degree burns to his face and hands.

The fighting continues

Those who braved the rain and marched, even amidst brutal violence, believe the fight against reform is not over.

For the government, the pension reform reached “the end of its democratic process” when the Constitutional Council validated, in mid-April, the main part of the text, in particular the postponement of the retirement age to 64 years.

Irritated by seeing a reform approved without a vote in the Assembly and by the work and pardon of article 49.3 of the Constitution, described as “undemocratic”, the opposition prepares its last weapons in the hope that the text will be repealed.

A little more than two weeks after the rejection of the request for a shared initiative referendum on pension reform presented by the left, the Constitutional Council has to decide again.

Will there be a referendum?

Next Wednesday the “wise men” will say yes or no to the second request for popular consultation formulated by communists, socialists and ecologists in the Senate and aimed at “prohibiting a legal retirement age above 62”.

If Yes wins, a major campaign will begin in the coming weeks to collect nearly 4.8 million signatures in nine months. In the long term, if the National Assembly or the Senate do not accept this proposal, a referendum on the pension at 64 will be held.

The left offered this second chance at the last minute, the day before the decision of the Constitutional Council on “RIP 1” and two days before the express promulgation of the law by Emmanuel Macron.

On April 13, despite the confidence shown by the parliamentarians in the drafting of their referendum bill, the president of the Communists in the Senate, Eliane Assassi, after having discussed at length with the head of the socialist senators, Patrick Kanner, presented her referendum project strengthened.

But the next day the constitutional judges invalidated the PIR’s request. In its conclusion, the rue de Montpensier constituency explains that “the proposal presented did not envisage any modification status of the law and cannot be analyzed as a reform”.

In other words, wanting to “affirm that the statutory retirement age cannot be set beyond 62”, the opponents of the reform have contented themselves with maintaining the current law.

This time things would have been different. “Our record is better than the first,” says Kanner. «Juridically he is more solid because he proposes a real reform», Assassi abounds.

Hoping for the success of its RIP project, the left not only reformulated the title of its text, which now claims to “prohibit the legal retirement age beyond 62”, but also added a second article, which refers to financing with the establishment of “a necessary contribution from investment income to the financing of pensions”.

It remains to be seen whether the pundits of rue de Montpensier will be sensitive to this new version.

Legislative solution?

A legislative exit? It’s the other hope. It nests in the hole of the parliamentary niche of the centrist Libertads, Independientes and Liot.

This small heterogeneous group, led by a veteran of the Assembly, Charles de Courson, was already in motion, on March 20, during the transpartisan motion of no confidence, rejected by 9 votes.

On June 8, they will present to their colleagues a bill, signed by 170 deputies, aimed at repealing article 7 of the pension reform, which delays the legal age to 64 years. Also research ‘how to organize a funding conference to ensure the sustainability of our pension system’.

“The social injustice at the heart of the pension reform is the reason for its massive rejection: it is this injustice that we must face,” explains the president of the Liot group, Bertrand Pancher.

Then the eyes on the left will turn to the rows on the right. On March 20, 19 conservative republican deputies (out of 61) thus voted in favor of the motion of no confidence, contrary to the opinion of their group leader, Eric Ciotti, and the president of his group, Olivier Marleix. Will they be tempted to vote on Liot’s text, or even to bring along new colleagues?

“We have to try everything”, insists Pierre Dharréville, who evokes “a symbolic decision, to mark our refusal to see this reform set in stone”.

It remains, as the last legislative exit door, another motion of no confidence more to overthrow the government of Prime Minister Elizabeth Borne. According to Insumisa deputy Clémentine Autain, both left-wing groups and Liot’s deputies are negotiating an initiative to that effect.

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