Tourists from Arab petro-monarchies continue to line up to enter luxury boutiques in the Champs-Elysées area, oblivious to the mountains of decomposing garbage piling up on the sidewalks. Paris, the capital of glamour, these days shows an even more shocking contrast than usual. In the unions’ final fight against pension reform, the rats are adding to the maximum pressure on Macron and his Government.
The Hermès flagship store, with its old wooden facade, in Place Henry Dunant, offers a small wicker handbag for 12,200 euros in the window. The whim of buying a vintage fishing rod costs 7,600 euros. Miraculously, there is no trash in front of the boutique, but it is enough to turn the corner to find bags torn open 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 garbage, due to the strike that has been going on for days by the municipal garbage collectors and the employees of three incineration facilities on the outskirts of the capital in solidarity with the protests against the delay of the retirement age. The stoppage must be extended until next Monday. Paris, already quite dirty in itself, now resembles Naples on its worst days.
Other cities, such as Nantes or Montpellier, are also suffering from garbage collectors’ strikes, but the case of Paris, for image reasons, is the most important. The Government is pressuring the mayor, the socialist Anne Hidalgo, to act. The City Council, as number two of the mayor, Emmanuel Grégoire, reiterated yesterday, is in solidarity with the strikers and holds the Government responsible for the conflict.
Detritus in the open air has attracted rats. It is already a public health problem. The leader of the municipal opposition, Rachida Dati, Sarkozy’s former Minister of Justice, who for years has not tired of denouncing the state of the city, is trying to profit from the crisis.
From the pages of the newspaper Le Parisien, Romain Lasseur, specialist in animal toxicology and pests, warned of the change in the behavior of rats after so many days of the presence of rubbish. According to Lasseur, these animals will get used to getting into the containers and breeding there, and they leave urine and excrement there, an additional risk for garbage collectors and the general population.
This is the context of today’s new mobilization. There will again be disruptions in various sectors, such as transport. The strike will coincide with the meeting of the joint joint commission between the National Assembly and the Senate to agree on a definitive text of the reform which, 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 Renaissance party and its centre-right allies, there are 250 MPs, but it is known that there will be a handful of dissidents, despite strong pressure to budge. Among the Republicans (LR, traditional right) it is believed that between 30 and 35 will vote yes, around 15 are inclined to no and 10 could abstain. Unless the Government makes some last-minute concession to LR, the suspense will continue until the end and everything can be decided by very few votes, a scenario not conducive to calming spirits. The Government wants to avoid approval by decree – a constitutional possibility – because this would remove legitimacy from the reform, provoke even more critics and pose a serious risk of setting the country on fire.
