The French National Assembly completed discussions on the draft pension reform in a state of chaos and tension without reaching an agreement, and on March 2 the draft was submitted to the Senate for further study.
Trade unions and the left and right opposition are blocking this grand project during the second term of Emmanuel Macron, which has led to five days of strikes and demonstrations across France.
The text of the pension reform met with great resistance from the trade unions, as well as from the left and right opposition.
This led to five days of strikes and demonstrations throughout France.
The project has also caused controversy within the presidential majority, which needs the support of “republican” parliamentarians (right) to pass the text.
The reform was the focus of a nine-day long debate in Parliament, during which there were calls for discipline and the suspension of sessions over the funding of the system.
Note that thousands of modifications have been made on the left. After the discussion was over, a large number of deputies rejected a vote of no confidence put forward by the right-wing nationalist Unity of the People party.
In the introduction to the vote of no confidence presented by her party, National Assembly leader Marine Le Pen denounced what she considered a “poorly presented and poorly explained project”.
She spoke of the “denial of democracy” by the government.
In response to these statements, Prime Minister Elizabeth Bourne said that the debate about the pension system revealed the faces of two “populist currents”, namely the extreme right and the radical left.
As for Labor Minister Olivier Dosso, who is responsible for protecting the text, he seriously stated that “the government will submit to the Senate the text that it presented at the beginning, with the amendments voted for” by the National Assembly.
Leaving the hall, he turned to the deputies of the Rebel France party (left radical): “You insulted me for 15 days.”
Before the end of the discussion, party leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon wrote in a blog: “Macron has failed in the National Assembly”, while the leader of the party’s bloc in the National Assembly, Mathilde Bannot, confirmed that “this reform has no parliamentary legitimacy.” .”
As might be expected, given the large number of amendments yet to be discussed and the Friday-Saturday midnight deadline, the session stalled on points far removed from Article VII, which raises the retirement age to 64, the most contentious provision.
Discussions during the evening focused on the duration of the contribution of pensioners, which allows them to take advantage of the “long career” plan, that is, those who entered the labor market before the age of twenty-one. Would you be 43 or 44 years old? This issue has not been clearly resolved.
And a number of GOP MPs are calling on anyone who started work before that age to be able to retire after paying dues for 43 years, with adulthood not an obstacle.
The parliamentary left was divided over the strategy to be adopted in what environmentalists saw as a “strategic failure” in the radical left’s choice to double down on the necessary amendments.
“The National Assembly is a deplorable spectacle of contempt for workers,” said Laurent Bergé, general secretary of the reformist trade union French Democratic Confederation of Labor (CFDT). It’s shameful.”
