The unpopular pension reform of French President Emmanuel Macron reaches its decisive hours. If everything goes as his government plans, tomorrow this controversial law will be approved that aims to delay the retirement age from the current 62 years to 64, after almost two months of protests, a thousand demonstrations throughout France and eight general strikes .
After its approval by the Senate last Saturday, a mixed joint commission (made up of seven deputies and seven senators) agreed on a final text on Wednesday to be validated tomorrow by the Senate, first, and then by the Assembly. It has done so with 10 votes in favor and four against. Parliamentarians have been meeting since early in the morning.
To prevent it from going ahead, and in a last attempt for the Government to back down, France is celebrating its eighth day of mobilizations and strikes this Wednesday. In some demonstrations there have been moments of tension -with police charges, in Paris, in Lyon and Toulouse- by “radical elements”, according to the forces of order.
In this final stretch of the debate there are some sectors that have made indefinite strikes to apply pressure. Curiously, one of those that has gone most unnoticed up to now, that of the garbage cans, is the one that is generating the most problems, even more than transport, since in Paris it has been a week since garbage has been collected in half of the districts .
The Government, without a parliamentary majority after the fiasco of the legislative elections last June, has been doing the math since Saturday to verify that tomorrow’s vote, the final one, comes out in favor and gets enough votes to carry out this project, the most important of this second term of Emmanuel Macron.
The approval of the reform has unpredictable consequences, due to the strong opposition it has and because there are many sectors that seem willing to continue protesting. The mobilization, led by all the unions united for the first time in years, began in January, but has been deflating little by little.
In principle, the Executive only has the support of the conservative party of Los Republicanos, although many of these deputies play the mistake and some could abstain. Macronism lives tense hours, because if it fails to push this law forward it would be a hard blow for the president, whose popularity has plummeted.
There is another alternative to approve the reform, which is to resort to article 49.3, a tool contemplated in the Constitution that allows a law to be approved without voting on it. This would be seen as an act of force on the part of the Government and, in fact, the left proposes suppressing this procedure, considering it undemocratic.
Macron’s government has skilfully flirted with all these footholds provided for in the law to face what they have described as “the boycott” of its reform by the radical left (La Francia Insumisa), which, in turn, also it has played its cards in the parliamentary process of this project, for example presenting tens of thousands of amendments in the Assembly.
This slowed down the debate so much that the deadline expired without the law being passed. The decisive day will be tomorrow. The parliamentarians have spent more than a month with marathon days and tension as had not been seen in a long time and the result of this vote is unpredictable.
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