French pensions: Macron’s feud with the Far Left is reaching boiling point

France’s unions are becoming just a little bit desperate. While it is clear that a majority – perhaps as much as two thirds – of voters are opposed to plans to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64, the government thus far is standing firm and the various strikes and demonstrations called are starting to lose traction. 

That is not to say that the unions won’t win in the end. They are resolved to continue their actions for as long as it takes and have the support of the Left in the National Assembly, whose deputies – particularly those of the hardline France Insoumise – are increasingly bloody-minded. 

In the meantime, the country is effectively on strike at least one day a week, causing widespread disruption not only on the days in question but over the succeeding 24 hours. The railways are the worst affected. On Tuesday, less than half of scheduled services were running. But teachers didn’t take part this time and it is an ongoing walkout by workers at refineries and power plants that is grabbing most of the headlines. 

On the streets, the number of demonstrators was down, with the police and interior ministry posting a total of less than a million – half that claimed by the unions. 

A fourth national strike is due to take place on Saturday that may well see a surge in participation as those with the weekend off throw their weight behind the protest. 

What is most striking is the fact that the government looks bent on staying the course. President Macron, unlike his predecessors in the Élysée, has made clear that pension reform is central to his mandate, and his prime minister, Elisabeth Borne, is refusing to yield to the central demands of the strikers and their backers. 

Borne – previously a minister for labour and, before that, a top civil servant – is turning out to be a formidable opponent of the Far Left, which is increasingly reduced to threats and verbal abuse. Deputies from France Insoumise and its allies have so far tabled a wholly unfeasible 20,506 amendments to the reform legislation, which, if individually addressed and voted on, would make passage of the Bill practically impossible. 

The prime minister’s strategy falls just short of an all-or-nothing approach. She has expressed sympathy for some of the more thought-out amendments, mostly to do with exceptions to retirement at 62 for those in physically demanding jobs and those who started their working lives straight from school. She may even bend further if she believes that realistic tweaks would get the job done. But she has on several occasions this month repeated her mantra that reform is essential if the country’s social security system – one of the most generous in Europe – is not to go bankrupt over the course of the next 20 years. 

The hope on the government side is that its centrist coalition, made up of Renaissance (formerly En Marche), Modem (Mouvement Démocrat) and Horizon (mainly supporters of the former prime minister Édouard Philippe) will be boosted by most of 61 deputies of the once-powerful Republican Party, now led by the rightist Éric Ciotti. In that event, the proposed legislation would pass by a narrow majority, obliging the Left to take more decisively to the streets. 

But short of such a majority, or in the event that the Opposition, including the Far Right National Rally, engages in what in America is known as a filibuster, the government stands ready to take any steps it considers necessary to secure passage of the Bill. This could mean transferring the process from the Assembly to the Senate (in which the government enjoys a comfortable majority), or even forcing legislation through without a vote under a provision of the Constitution known as 49.3. Both options are fraught with risk, but the risk to Macron of failure is greater, as the collapse of the Bill would effectively put an end to his authority as President. 

For the unions, too, it is a gamble. In past decades, mass strikes were what French governments feared most. They can seem impressive on the day, with a million or more protesters on the march, carrying banners and setting off flares. But if the police are right and overt support for the protest is starting to tail off, the impact is proportionately reduced. 

The danger for ministers is that the tempo could pick up again if ordinary people in their millions come to believe that the government, whether out of conviction or sheer pig-headedness, resorts to special measures that bypass both the Assembly and the popular will. Saturday’s turnout could be the turning point. If one million protesters genuinely becomes two million, or even three million, and if violence should erupt on the fringes, causing the police to charge the crowds, the mood could change overnight. 

For now, in spite of a pervasive sense of frustration, it is the government that looks to hold the initiative. The question, though, that hangs in the air is how far Macron and Borne will be prepared to go in pursuit of their objective. As François Ruffin, one of the Left’s leading voices, put it on Monday, is the government out to convince (convaincre) the people of the rightness of its cause, or simply to vanquish (vaincre) them?