There are many people in France protesting over pensions

The Paris protests against rising living costs are going nowhere in the 21st century: The climate of social unrest threatens to make France tougher

PARIS — Tens of thousands of people marched in Paris on Sunday to protest rising living costs, amid an increasingly tense political atmosphere marked by strikes at oil refineries and nuclear plants that threaten to spread further.

The march had been planned long before the strikes by a coalition of left-wing parties eager to capitalize on the cost-of-living crisis and assert itself as the leading opposition force to President Emmanuel Macron. But on Sunday, organizers signaled that they intended to build momentum from the climate of social unrest to increase pressure on Mr. Macron’s government.

“We need to be tougher,” said David Guiraud, a lawmaker from France Unbowed, the hard-left party that led Sunday’s protest. He said that the government could no longer make its own decisions.

Mr. Macron finds himself in a perilous situation. He is facing discontent over shortages of gas stations, as well as labor strikes and a large amount of opposition in the National Assembly, the lower and more powerful house of Parliament, which could try to bring down his government this week over the budget bill.

French schools, airports and trains will face heavy disruption Tuesday for the sixth time this year, as unions galvanize people nationwide in protest against government plans to raise the retirement age for most workers.

France’s civil aviation authority has asked airlines to reduce flights at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle and Orly airports. Air France said it would not cancel more than 20% of short-haul flights. The airline cautioned, however, that “last-minute delays and cancellations cannot be ruled out.”

National railway operator SNCF said very few regional trains would operate and that four out of five trains on the TGV, France’s intercity high-speed rail service, would be canceled.

CGT Secretary General Michel Macron, the French Pension System, and the December 1 January 2019 Paris Citizen’s Day in Desperate City Life

The secretary general of the CGT, the largest French union, said in an interview with Le Journal du Dimanche that they were moving up a gear and that they expected the government to listen to workers.

The legal age of retirement was not part of Mr. Macron’s initial project. Instead, he was aiming for an across-the-board overhaul of the pension system’s dizzyingly complex architecture. The goal was to merge 42 different pension programs into what he said would be a fairer, unified system, using points that workers would accumulate and cash in upon retirement. But the plans left many confused and worried that their pensions would decrease.

The January 19 demonstrations brought the country to a standstill as well as causing the Eiffel Tower to close.

The government has said the pension legislation is necessary to tackle a funding deficit, but the reforms have angered workers at a time when living costs are rising.

If there is no support from opposition lawmakers, Macron’s government could turn to Article 49.3 of the French constitution, a mechanism it has used several times already to push through budget-related bills without putting them to a parliamentary vote.

The government acknowledges that making the French work longer will be difficult but insists that is necessary to balance the system’s finances.

According to the O.E.C.D. France has one of the lowest rates of poverty in Europe, with a net pensions replacement rate of 74 percent, higher than the O.E.C.D.

But the government argues that rising life expectancies have left the system in an increasingly precarious state. In 2000, there were 2.1 workers paying into the system for every one retiree; in 2020 that ratio had fallen to 1.7, and in 2070 it is expected to drop to 1.2, according to official projections.

Antoine Bozio, an economist at the Paris School of Economics, said that there was no short-term “explosion of the deficit” that needed to be addressed urgently. But “once you’ve said that the system isn’t in danger or on the verge of a catastrophe,” he said, “that doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem” in the long term.