French protests against President Emmanuel Macron’s pension reform saw a sharp drop in mobilization on Thursday before a ruling on the law’s constitutionality.
Around 380,000 people took part in a 12th day of marches across the country, down from 570,000 a week ago, according to the Interior Ministry. This was well below a record 1.28 million turnout on March 7.
Participation in a strike in sectors including railways, public transport, and education was also lower than previously. The Paris metro and international train routes like Eurostar and Thalys operated almost normally. Strikes at TotalEnergies SE refinery units ended over the past few days and deliveries have resumed.
The bill to raise France’s minimum retirement age by two years to 64 has already passed parliament, but labor organizations want to keep pushing Macron to back down. Workers briefly stormed the headquarters of luxury giant LVMH in central Paris on Thursday. Also in the capital, garbage workers resumed an open-ended strike, only days after streets had finally been cleared of mounds of trash.
Unions and the government are now focused on the decision of the Constitutional Council, due to be announced Friday evening. The nine-member body made up chiefly of former politicians and senior civil servants said it will rule on the law and an opposition-backed request to put the reform to a referendum.
It’s unlikely the council will declare the entire law unconstitutional — something that’s happened only twice since its creation in 1958. But it could rule that portions of the law shouldn’t have been folded into the supplementary social-security budget bill that the government used as a vehicle to enact the pension reform. Unless the council rejects the reform outright, some level of conflict over pensions will likely continue at least until Macron enacts the changes later this year.
A 69-year-old retired school teacher in Paris who took part in the protests in support of young people, and declined to give her name, said she doesn’t expect much from the Council. She said the Council’s members will decide on legal aspects and technicalities, while what mattered was people’s lives.
Polls show that French people back the union-led efforts to oppose Macron with strikes and protests, although that support may wane if the overhaul passes the test of the Council. According to a survey of 1,015 French adults by Ifop for the Journal du Dimanche, 48% would want the strikes and protests to end if the ruling validates the bill.
Macron’s government says raising the pension age is vital to boost employment rates and halt the build-up of deficits in the massive public retirement system as the population ages. Unions say changing the age thresholds to claim a full pension will disproportionately penalize the least well-off and that there are other options to balance the system, including higher taxes on business and the wealthy.
The conflict over pensions is threatening to engulf Macron’s agenda of pro-business economic change that he has led since first taking office in 2017. Backing down at this late stage of the legislative process would be a hobbling political defeat, yet going ahead risks destroying relations with unions that the government needs to work with on future overhauls.
In the short term, the strikes and protests are also beginning to drag on the economy as some sectors such as oil refining and hospitality are particularly hit. The Bank of France said earlier this week that economic output likely declined in March, although resilience in January and February means the country avoided a contraction over the quarter.
--With assistance from James Regan, Angelina Rascouet and Ania Nussbaum.
©2023 Bloomberg L.P.
