Tourists from the Arab petromonarchies continue to queue to enter the luxury boutiques in the Champs Elysees area, oblivious to the mountains of rotting rubbish piling up on the sidewalks. Paris, the capital of glamour, shows these days an even more shocking contrast than usual. In the final fight of the unions against the pension reform, the rats are adding to the maximum pressure on Macron and his government.
The Hermès flagship store, with its old wooden façade, in Henry Dunant square, offers a small wicker women’s bag in its window for 12,200 euros. The whim of acquiring a vintage fishing rod costs 7,600 euros. Miraculously, there is no garbage in front of the boutique, but just turn the corner to find the bags burst by rodents. The exquisite and the sordid, a few meters away.
The landscape is similar in many neighborhoods of Paris, including the most affluent, and in the streets near the Elysée Palace. Yesterday it was estimated that there were more than 6,600 tons of uncollected waste, due to the strike that municipal garbage collectors and employees of three incineration facilities on the outskirts of the capital have been carrying out for days in solidarity with the protests against the delay in the retirement age. The strike should last until next Monday. Paris, already dirty enough, now looks like Naples in its worst days.
Other cities, such as Nantes or Montpellier, also suffer a garbage collector strike, but the case of Paris, for reasons of image, is the most important. The Government is pressuring the mayoress, the socialist Anne Hidalgo, to act. The City Council, as the number two of the mayoress, Emmanuel Grégoire, reiterated yesterday, is in solidarity with the strikers and holds the Government responsible for the conflict.
Outdoor debris has attracted rats. It is already a public health problem. The leader of the municipal opposition, Rachida Dati, Sarkozy’s former Justice Minister, who for years has not tired of denouncing the state of the city, is trying to take advantage of the crisis. “The fact that there are twice as many rats in Paris as there are inhabitants is not linked to this strike,” she recalled.
From the pages of the newspaper Le Parisien, Romain Lasseur, a specialist in animal toxicology and pests, warned of the change in the behavior of rats after so many days in the presence of garbage. According to Lasseur, these animals are going to get used to getting into containers and reproducing there, leaving urine and excrement, an additional risk for garbage collectors and the population in general.
This is the context of today’s new mobilization. There will be disruptions again in various sectors, such as transport. The strike will coincide with the meeting of the mixed joint commission between the National Assembly and the Senate to agree on a final text of the reform that, in principle, must be voted on Thursday in both chambers.
There is uncertainty and nervousness in the government ranks because it is not guaranteed that there will be the necessary 287 favorable votes. Between Macron’s Renacimiento party and its center-right allies there are 250 deputies, but it is known that there will be a handful of dissidents, despite strong pressure to close ranks. Among Los Republicanos (LR, traditional right), it is believed that between 30 and 35 will vote yes, some 15 are inclined to no and 10 could abstain. Unless the Government makes some last-minute concession to LR, the suspense will last until the end and everything can be decided by very few votes, a scenario that is not conducive to calming things down. The government wants to avoid approval by decree – a constitutional possibility – because that would delegitimize the reform, provoke critics even more and pose a serious risk of setting the country on fire.
