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Macron's government survives but faces wrath from France over changes to retire

2023-03-21T13:04:17.033Z


Two no-confidence motions failed to oust President Emmanuel Macron's cabinet over a new law raising the retirement age from 62 to 64.


PARIS - The French National Assembly on Monday rejected a vote of no confidence against the government of President

Emmanuel Macron,

ensuring that a highly contested bill raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 becomes law.

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

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 for his apparent estrangement and at the way the measure was pushed through parliament last week without a full vote on the bill itself.

The Senate, the upper house of the French Parliament, approved the pension bill this month.

A second motion of no confidence, presented by the far-right National Association, also failed on Monday, with only 94 lawmakers voting in favour.

The change, which Macron has sought since the start of his first term in 2017, has sparked two months of

demonstrations, intermittent strikes and occasional violence

.

It has divided France, with polls consistently showing that

two-thirds

of the population oppose the revision.

After the votes on Monday, there were no signs that the protests were going to subside or that the climate of turmoil caused by this crisis was going to subside anytime soon.

France is facing a period of

deep uncertainty

, and it is unclear how Macron, who has remained silent, will be able to reassert his authority.

"Through strikes and demonstrations, we must force the withdrawal of the bill,"

Jean-Luc Mélenchon,

the far-left leader, said after the vote.

As night fell, sporadic violent clashes between crowds of protesters and police broke out in cities across the country, including Strasbourg, Rennes and Lyon.

In Paris, small groups of protesters played cat and mouse with the police, knocking over rubbish bins and setting fire to uncollected trash.

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

The unions have called for a day of strikes and demonstrations for Thursday, with

Marine Le Pen

, leader of the National Rally party, declaring:

"I think it is difficult to govern in these circumstances."

French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne (L) speaks with the president of the "Horizons" parliamentary group, Edouard Philippe (R), 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 has held out and the fall of the government has been averted.

Before the vote, in a speech of fierce indignation,

Élisabeth Borne

, the Prime Minister, denounced lawmakers who "deny the role of Parliament and claim that the street is more legitimate than our institutions."

Clearly addressing both the far right and the far left, who have led the opposition to the pensions review, he accused them of a "

paroxysm

" of anti-parliamentary and anti-democratic behaviour.

The question of who may be undermining 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 wanted to do, Macron opted for a measure, known as 49.3 by the relevant article of the

Constitution

, that allows certain bills to pass without a vote.

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

This is the

eleventh time

in less than a year that the French government has resorted to clause 49.3, prompting a growing sense among Macron's opponents that the country's democratic process was being circumvented, even if the move is legal under the Constitution of the Fifth Republic, designed to create the

all-powerful presidency

intended by

Charles de Gaulle.

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

"They have not managed to unite; they have not managed to convince".

And he added that approving the bill last week without a full parliamentary vote was contrary to "the spirit of the Constitution."

In fact, Macron's move was

entirely 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 is not clear how the Council will finally rule, nor what parts of the law it could annul, if at all.

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

In the end, there were just enough votes from center-right Republicans - who last year had proposed raising the retirement age further, to 65 - to save the law and Borne's government.

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

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

As they talked to their constituents over the weekend, some Republicans began to defect.

One legislator, Maxime Minot, said he had to vote in a way that "preserves the trust of the administered."

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 growing debt, a

system that is unsustainable.

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

The books, at least in the long run, simply didn't add up, as the ratio of active workers to retirees who 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 is nothing less than a choice of the society we want."

Now Macron, with more than four years left in his term and unable to run for re-election in 2027, believes he has laid the groundwork for the huge investments in defense, 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 seem to mark Macron's second term, just as the Yellow Vests protest movement did his first.

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

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

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

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

"For months, the government has been playing with matches at a service station."

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

The logic of changing pensions, at a time when people are living longer and

most European states

have raised the retirement age to 65 or more, was unpersuasive to many French people fiercely attached to the cherished balance between work and family life in the country.

They did not 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, although its finances in the medium term appear pitiful.

Many French people see the imposition of a longer working life as an attack on the social solidarity at the heart of the French model and a

move by 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 Macron's pension review "required courage" because asking the French to work longer is "always more difficult" than making promises "with money that we do not have".

As a result of Macron's

virtually unlimited spending

to help the French overcome the COVID-19 pandemic, French public debt which stood at 98.1% of gross domestic product in 2017 rose to 113.4% in the third quarter of 2022.

The president was doubly convinced, in these circumstances, that retirement at 62 was an untenable remnant from another era.

Macron is likely to address the nation in the coming days in an attempt to promote

reconciliation.

He is a persuasive speaker, but since he cannot run again, succession maneuvers have clearly begun, especially by Le Pen, the nationalist, anti-immigration party leader who is always biding her 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 people see her as a danger to democratic stability and the rule of law that Macron

has defeated her twice.

Two electoral victories have shown that dismissing 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 provide opportunities for him to

revive his battered fortunes.

c.2023 The New York Times Company

look too

Pension reform in France: thirty years of battles

Source: clarin

All news articles on 2023-03-21

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