Macron faced with renewed pension protests on return to France
Emmanuel Macron has been confronted with fresh street protests on his return to France as popular discontent around the French President’s pension reforms continues. Strikes and demonstrations have been widespread across the county in the past month as French workers react to plans to raise the pension age in France from 62 to 64.
France’s constitutional council is due to vote on the pension reform bill this Friday amid questions over how Macron plans to appease public anger.
Following a request by French Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne, the constitutional council has been tasked with judging whether Macron’s pension reform is allowed under France’s constitution.
In Paris, as thousands marched along the designated protest route, some protesters holding lit flares veered off to the Constitutional Council.
They faced off with a large contingent of police deployed outside the building, where hours before the march got underway other protesters had dumped bags of garbage.
The trash piles were cleaned up but signalled the start of a new strike by garbage collectors, timed to begin with the nationwide protest marches.
A previous strike last month left the streets of the French capital filled for days with mounds of reeking refuse.
Also before the main march, more than 100 railroad workers marched down a Paris street of luxury boutiques, invading luxury conglomerate LVMH offices and going to the first floor before exiting.
Fabien Villedieu of the Sud-Rail Union said LVMH “could reduce all the holes” in France’s social security system. “So one of the solutions to finance the pension system is a better redistribution of wealth, and the best way to do that is to tax the billionaires.”
Early on in the main Paris protest, security forces intervened to stop vandals damaging a shop, with 15 people detained, police said. Like in past protests, several hundred “radical elements” had mixed inside the march, police said.
Thousands also marched in Toulouse, Marseille and elsewhere. Tensions mounted at protests in Brittany, notably in Nantes and Rennes, where a car was burned.
“The mobilization is far from over,” the leader of the leftist CGT union, Sophie Binet, said at a trash incineration site south of Paris where several hundred protesters blocked garbage trucks.
“As long as this reform isn’t withdrawn, the mobilization will continue in one form or another.”
CGT has been the backbone of the protest and strike movement challenging Macron’s plan to increase France’s retirement age.
