Fresh protests hit France in pensions standoff
Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in nationwide protests in France Thursday against President Emmanuel Macron’s pension reforms. The controversial reforms seek to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64, AFP reported.
French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne on Friday said the country needs “cooling off” after weeks of fierce clashes over Macron’s pension reforms, apparently distancing herself from the inflexible president.
Divergence is rare between Macron and Borne, a career technocrat who regularly denies having further political ambitions.
“We have to give people a rest. The country needs cooling off,” Borne told media including daily Le Monde. After a meeting with worker representatives broke up without any progress Wednesday, she added that “the unions must not emerge humiliated” from the pensions battle.
“It’s better to have calming words than stigmatising words,” Laurent Berger, head of France’s largest union the CFDT, told broadcaster BFM on Friday morning.
Nevertheless, “if things are to be completely calmed down, this reform must be set aside” in line with demands from the united front of unions, he added.
In comments from Macron’s multi-day state visit to China this week, a source in the president’s entourage had insisted the pension reform plan was democratically approved.
Opponents of the law were infuriated when the government last month used a constitutional provision to ram their changes through France’s hung parliament without a vote.