Reform of the French pension system faces a difficult final stage in Parliament by the EFE

PARIS, MARCH 12 (.) — Emmanuel Macron’s government breathed a breath of fresh air on Saturday with support from the Senate for his unpopular pension reform, while street protests called by unions lost momentum. But the bill still has a difficult parliamentary way to go.

“The party is not finished,” Laurent Berger, secretary general of the French Democratic Federation of Labor (CFDT), confirmed in an interview on BFMTV on Sunday.

French trade union organizations are far from conceding the battle to overthrow the reform, whose main focus is delaying the minimum retirement age, and they hope to re-establish their system on the fifteenth, with a new day of national protests.

It would be the eighth total since the government revealed details of its proposal to change access to retirement pension last January. Moreover, the date is not accidental, but coincides with the next major stage of the project at the parliamentary level.

On that day, a joint committee of seven senators and seven deputies must meet to agree on a joint text that takes into account the latest amendments and must then be ratified again by both chambers.

The commission’s action does not present itself as a major stumbling block for the grand tendency, which will be well represented alongside its main partners in the company for pension reform, the conservative bloc of Los Republicanos (LR).

The head of this party that embodies the classic right, Eric Ciotti, published an opinion column on Sunday in the Journal du Dimanche, in which he defended the need to reform the system, stating that his people would continue to act as a “useful opposition”.

Once a joint version of the text is reached, the motion will return to the Senate and National Assembly from March 16.

Getting new support from the Senate, which last night adopted the reform with 195 votes in favor and 112 against, is not expected to be complicated either.

However, the National Assembly is presented as a more complex scenario, because the ruling bloc, even while maintaining the support of the LR, would achieve a very severe absolute majority.

The leader of the Federal Council against Apartheid stressed this Sunday, which he considers that the government’s “deafness” to the most important protest movement “in the past fifty years.”

If it does not obtain the necessary support in the National Assembly, the French government will find itself at a dangerous crossroads: dropping the project that has become its great flag of the political course or imposing approval without submitting it to the approval of the deputies.

This will be possible thanks to Article 49.3 of the Constitution, which gives the government that power, exposing it in exchange for the possibility of a motion of censure.

During the current legislature, the French Prime Minister, Elisabeth Bourne, has already used it to approve some initiatives – such as the latest budgets – since there has been no official absolute majority since the 2022 legislatures.

“Fully committed to allowing final adoption in the coming days,” Borne said last night, via Twitter (NYSE: NYSE), implying that the government will not resort to the conflicting 49.3.

For the opposition and the unions, a “brutal” resort to this constitutional mechanism, while legal, would show little legitimacy on the part of the government.

“Yesterday we felt more anger,” warned the CFDT leader, who warned despite his mild tone today that forcible approval would generate a “dangerous” scenario.

At the earliest, the final vote will be possible on March 16th and the deadline for approval of the reform until March 26th, at the end of the day.

The main axis of the project promoted by Macron is to delay the minimum retirement age by two years, from the current 62 years to 64 years, but also to accelerate the entry into force of the increase in the subscription period – up to 43 years – to receiving the full pension.

The government defends the changes as the only possible way to ensure a fiscal balance of the system on the horizon of 2030, because if nothing is done, it estimates that within ten years a deficit of nearly 150,000 million euros will accumulate.