French President Emmanuel Macron faces a dilemma on Thursday: Bet on the support of conservative lawmakers to pass his pension reform or avoid the risk of it being rejected by using a controversial provision to bypass parliament.
(Bloomberg) — French President Emmanuel Macron faces a dilemma on Thursday: Bet on the support of conservative lawmakers to pass his pension reform or avoid the risk of it being rejected by using a controversial provision to bypass parliament.
The government is expected to say whether it will take the latter option — known as article 49.3 — before a possible vote on the plan at the National Assembly at 3 p.m. Paris time. Senators in the upper house backed the bill as expected in a morning session.
“If I was them I would be worried,” Olivier Marleix, head of the conservative Republicains group in the lower house, told Bloomberg. He said he wasn’t confident the government would get the majority it needs, adding that he believed it was probably about seven votes short.
Macron’s attempt to raise France’s minimum retirement age by two years to 64 has become a defining challenge of his second term. The investment banker-turned-president says change is vital to avoid ballooning deficits in the public system and boost investment in areas such as cleaner energy.
Labor unions remain vehemently opposed to the reform and have organized a series of protests and strikes that began in mid-January. They argue that changing age thresholds will disproportionately affect the least well-off, in particular those who began working early in life without going to college.
Union leaders have also urged Macron not to use article 49.3, with the head of the hardline CGT, Philippe Martinez, warning that doing so would justify further industrial action and constitute a serious threat to democracy.
A survey by pollster Ifop for Le Journal du Dimanche newspaper showed three-quarters of the 1,006 people it interviewed on March 14-15 consider that resorting to the tool is unjustified.
‘Urgent Reform’
The government has insisted it wants to garner enough backing to win a vote in parliament and has sought to convince Republicains lawmakers, who traditionally favor the idea of working longer, to help it get the reform through the lower house as it seeks greater democratic legitimacy.
“More than ever, the government is trying to find a natural majority that can support this urgent reform, which is crucial for our country,” spokesman Olivier Veran said on Wednesday after a weekly cabinet meeting at which he said the 49.3 option wasn’t discussed.
Using the workaround also exposes the government to a possible no-confidence vote, which, if successful, would mean the government would be overturned and the bill rejected.
The latest protests against the pensions overhaul on Wednesday failed to mobilize as many people as on most previous days, with numbers totaling 480,000, compared with a peak of 1.28 million a week earlier, according to Interior Ministry figures.
While the government will pay close attention to the decline in participation as it weighs its next move, a large majority of French people still support the protests and oppose the reform. A separate poll this week by Ifop for Sud Radio put that opposition at 68%.
Strikes also continued in some sectors on Thursday, with thousands of tons of garbage left uncollected on the streets of Paris and some continued disruption to rail services.
France’s main labor unions said in a joint statement following the eighth day of protests, in which they estimated more than 1.5 million people took part, that they remained determined to fight the plan. They called on lawmakers to reject the bill.
“The government has used every constitutional trick to limit parliamentary debate,” the unions said. “This attitude amounts to a denial of democracy.”
–With assistance from Samy Adghirni.
(Updates with Senate vote in second paragraph, lawmaker comment in third paragraph.)
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