The spokesman for the French Government, Olivier Véran, yesterday rejected the union’s proposal to resort to independent mediation on the pension reform. “You don’t necessarily need mediation to talk”, said Véran, who made it clear that the reform cannot be renegotiated and that, if there are talks, they will be direct and on other issues such as the working conditions of older workers or remuneration .
The spokesman’s words were in line with what President Emmanuel Macron said in a televised interview last week and during a press conference in Brussels. The unions associated an eventual mediation with a pause in the procedure to promulgate the law on the reform, only pending the legal analysis of the Constitutional Council. The Government did not want to fall into the trap of accepting a mediation which, implicitly, meant admitting that the project could be reconsidered.
The inflexibility of the Executive was highlighted in the tenth day of mobilizations, which registered a clear downward trend in demonstrators and strikers. The monitoring of stoppages was quite minor in education, railways and public transport.
Marches in Paris and other cities were less numerous. In the capital, 93,000 people took part, according to the prefecture, and 450,000 according to the CGT. The numbers are always so disparate. The Ministry of the Interior deployed 5,500 police and gendarmes to prevent a repeat of riots as serious as those on Thursday last week.
In both Paris and Bordeaux there were incidents due to the presence of violent demonstrators, the black blocs, who smashed some shop windows and burned street furniture, as well as confronting the police. The situation was quite under control by the standards of the French rioters.
“We will continue until we force Macron to negotiate,” declared Jacques, a 62-year-old computer scientist who went to the Paris march, to this newspaper.
– Maybe because we want to live in a different way.
“In Spain, the Government was much smarter – spoke up Denis, 61, head of the after-sales service of a company -. He spoke to all the social agents, to the people, he explained. He made things better so that the people would accept it. Here Macron has taken us for fools. No town is an idiot.” “What is certain is that Macron has ruined his mandate – added Denis -. Any other reforms will be blocked. He has lost all his credibility.”
For Nadège, a 36-year-old primary school teacher, Macron has given “the false pretext” of financial balance, when “there are dozens of ways to get the money without taking it from people by delaying retirement”. According to her, the stubborn French resistance is explained by a very deep awareness: “These are rights that are the result of very important social movements and people do not want to give them up”.
