President Emmanuel Macron’s predecessors invariably surrendered in the battle of wills that pits the French street against elected officials.
As protest strikes against Macron’s pension reform move into their sixth day on Wednesday, demonstrators are demanding the complete withdrawal of the measure.
Trade unions said 885,000 people marched throughout France on Tuesday. The interior ministry said they numbered 339,000. In any case, the numbers declined substantially from the previous mass demonstrations on December 5th.
Prime minister Edouard Philippe will offer concessions on television at noon on Wednesday. Philippe is a protégé of Alain Juppé, the former prime minister who provoked a similar strike, also over pension reform, in December 1995. Juppé stuck to his guns for three weeks, caved in and left office six months later.
Was there anything Philippe could say to calm the protests?
I asked Claude (61), a hotel receptionist and militant with the neo-Communist CGT union. No, he replied. “He ought to do like his buddy Juppé, withdraw the reform and start serious discussions on a pension reform that would be fair.”
Macron is seeking to unify France’s 42 pension schemes into a simplified, points-based system.
Claude wants the rich to finance pensions for low-paid workers. Thousands of wealthy French households are already tax exiles in Brussels and London, I noted. “So we have to take measures to prevent them leaving,” he said.
Rap music blasted from loudspeakers on the top of a truck. Demonstrators queued alongside a van selling sausage and chips. The trade unions, which were considered moribund, have been reinvigorated by the pension protests. Large helium balloons emblazoned with the CGT’s insignia floated above the crowd, which stretched as far as the eye could see.
Convergence of struggles
A “convergence of struggles” is the dream of the left and the government’s nightmare. The extent of the strike, and the fact that it has mobilised people of all ages, colours and professional categories, poses a threat to Macron.
Every demonstrator I spoke to said they were determined to continue until the reform was scrapped.
The attempted suicide of a 22-year-old student in Lyon last month, after his scholarship was cancelled, sparked the participation of lycée students, said 17-year-old Sarah.
“The government made a big mistake when it took on pensions, because everyone retires some day. So Macron attacked all socio-economic categories,” she said.
About 30 youths from her Paris school participated in Tuesday’s march, alongside other students, transport workers, teachers, hospital personnel and civil servants.
Despite government assurances, the French are convinced they will have to work longer for less money. “We cannot lie to ourselves. People will have to contribute more,” Macron said on October 3rd. Though he intends to maintain the legal retirement age of 62, employees would have to work beyond 62 to draw a full pension.
There was something startling about a pretty, stylishly-dressed young woman with braces on her teeth justifying the violence that accompanies protest marches.
“If there’s violence it’s because there’s a reason,” Sarah said. “When we break things it’s because we’re fighting for things and the state doesn’t listen. When people aren’t listened to, frustration transforms itself into violence.”
Finance
François Rufin is a deputy in the National Assembly from the far-left France Unbowed party. Like Macron, Rufin studied at the Catholic lycée La Providence in Amiens. He made a scathing documentary about business management titled Merci Patron. “My enemy is finance” was his campaign slogan.
“Everyone has the feeling that the world of finance and the multinationals installed their man in the Élysée,” Rufin says over the din of the demonstration, as we walk through a bright yellow smoke bomb.
This feels like class warfare, I say. Rufin quotes the US billionaire Warren Buffet: “There’s class warfare all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
If Macron succeeds in imposing his pension reform, Rufin continues, “they will have won another battle in the war between the classes. People are opposing that today.”
