Presidential majority and opponents of all stripes of the pension reform are camped on Sunday on their position the day after a 4th day of mobilization which allowed the unions to maintain the pressure and to brandish the threat of a “France at a standstill” . By succeeding in gathering for the first time on a Saturday, between 963,000 and 2.5 million demonstrators according to the sources, the united unions led by the CFDT-CGT duo demonstrated to the government that they could always count on the support of the street. in the face of the postponement of the legal retirement age from 62 to 64 years.
What comfort the inter-union in its strategy. This calls for a fifth act on February 16 and raises the specter of a “France at a standstill” on March 7, according to methods which vary between the two union locomotives of the movement: the CGT favoring renewable strikes, the CFDT evoking ghost town operations.
On his blog, LFI leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon again offered the unions on Saturday evening, “a new convergence” with the key to a rally “a Saturday or Sunday in March”. For her part, the leader of the deputies RN Marine Le Pen, who had not called for a demonstration, judged that “after this new day of mobilization (…), the executive (could) not continue to look elsewhere by refusing to listen to the French”.
A necessity “
The government cannot in any case “remain deaf” at this “exceptional moment of mobilization of the world of work”, argued the number 1 of the CFDT Laurent Berger, guest of the Grand Jury RTL-Le Figaro-LCI Sunday. At the same time, the Minister of Labor Olivier Dussopt recognized on France 3 that the disagreement on the controversial age measurement at the heart of the reform was “quite insurmountable”. The reform is a “necessity”, reiterated his colleague Olivier Véran, spokesperson for the government invited by Political Questions for France Inter, France Télévisions and The world.
Closed to the fundamentals of the reform, the two ministers emphasized a strengthening of the senior index system during the parliamentary debates, which was supposed to encourage companies to keep the over 55s in employment, one of the leitmotifs of the CFDT. “We have a reform that is hard, I compared the index [senior] with the lettuce because it is decoration, but in the end, it does not change the philosophy”, commented the ecologist deputy Sandrine Rousseau, guest of the Grand rendez-vous Europe 1/The echoes/CNEWS.
Difficult to see in the evolution of this provision, a means of reconciling the two parts, the more so as the debates with the Assembly which will enter Monday afternoon in their second week skate. The first week of the exam ended hodge-podge in the tumult of a controversy resulting in the exclusion for 15 days of an LFI deputy, sanctioned for having set foot, in a tweet, on a ball at the effigy of Minister of Labor Olivier Dussopt.
“Lamentable spectacle”
A rare point of convergence between the majority and the unions, the two camps agree to deplore the “lamentable spectacle” of the debates at the Palais Bourbon, as Laurent Berger points out, who compares them to those on the “set of Cyril Hanouna”. “What we are shown on television or elsewhere, it does not make the Republic grow and it does not nourish social cohesion”, abounded the number 1 of FO Frédéric Souillot on Radio J.
Incidentally, the Cedto leader is tackling the strategy of LFI, which has filed thousands of amendments to the text, a “bullshit” according to him. The unions are demanding that in the Assembly, article 7, which bears the age measure, can be the subject of a debate and a vote. A total of 15,867 amendments remain to be examined, but the debates must imperatively end on Friday at midnight.
“We are ready for the debate”, reaffirmed Sunday in the JDD the patron saint of Renaissance deputies, Aurore Bergé. But if the deputy of Yvelines shows concern not to “cut the thread of the dialogue”, she remains no less inflexible and warns the unions tempted by the “path of blocking”. As a prelude to a new stage in the showdown.