France has seen a fifth day of strikes and Al-Khamis demonstrations to protest a project to change France’s pension system, but mobilization is expected to be less than predecessors as unions want to focus on the March 7 transition with their threat to “paralyze “the country, and the trade unions want within 24 hours. The fifth mobilization is the continuation of pressure on the deputies, whose heated debate on this project ends in mid-Friday, until the text is also submitted to the Senate for consideration. However, the trade union front wants to mobilize all its forces for the movement on March 7, promising to “paralyze” the country if the government does not abandon its project to raise the retirement age is set at 64 from the current 62, with the possibility of expanding the protest movement.
In the midst of school holidays in all parts of the country except for the Paris region and Occitania in southwest France, the number of participants is expected to decrease significantly, and the impact of the protest movement on Thursday was limited to transport, with four express trains running out of five, at the time as in the Paris metro, traffic is normal, except that 30% of flights at Paris-Orly airport are canceled.
In the energy sector, EDF workers cut power generation by just over 3,000 megawatts, the equivalent of three nuclear reactors, on several occasions, without power cuts to customers.
A petition launched by unions to protest the “unfair” pension reform project has garnered a million signatures, according to the change.org platform, and on the other days of mobilization since mid-January, about a million people have turned out, according to official figures.
Parallel to trade union pressure, deputies have clashed since February 6 in the National Assembly, where the government of Prime Minister Elizabeth has only a relative majority, during the discussion of the bill, and the opposition, in particular the left, are fighting for filibustering. The heads of eight major trade unions will hold a demonstration in the city of Albi , which is home to 50 thousand people. In the south of the country, since it is a symbol of medium-sized cities, which are witnessing a large mobilization in protest against the project.
“We want to highlight one of the main features of the movement,” Laurent Berger, president of the reformist CFDT union, told the union magazine. There is a working-class France that wants to assert itself, and not just the big cities.”
The deputies are entering the final stage of their deliberations, and to speed up the process, the French left has decided to withdraw many amendments, but there are still 11,000 amendments to be discussed, most of them, before the seventh paragraph of the text, which provides for raising the statutory retirement age from 62 up to 64 years old.
French President Emmanuel Macron is risking much of his political capital in this project, which symbolizes his stated intention to reform France and represents the main program for his second term.
Macron has so far remained in the back row, leaving it to the prime minister to defend the project in the media and on the political front, but at a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, he felt that “opponents have lost their compass and are completely lost,” two participants told AFP. meeting, as reported by the newspaper Le Figaro.
France is one of the European countries that has the lowest retirement age, although it is not possible to fully compare the various systems adopted, and the government has decided to increase the length of the working year in order to address the financial decline in pension funds and due to the aging of pension funds. Population.