The country has been brought to a standstill by France pension reform strikes

French Schools, Airlines and Trains Will Be Undermining Retirement During the R-World War II Sesquicent Regeneration Revisited

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, meanwhile, has asked airlines to reduce scheduled flights by 20% and 30% at Charles de Gaulle and Orly airports in Paris respectively. Air France said about 20% of short-haul flights would be canceled, but long-haul services would be maintained. The airline warned that last-minute delays and cancellations can not 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.

The CGT, the biggest French union, is moving up a gear, and will intensify their campaign until the government listens to workers, the secretary general said in an interview published on Sunday.

But pensions have long been a flashpoint for the French who are congenitally reluctant to give up any of a host of such traditional perks, some tracing back to the time of Louis XIV in the 17th century. Dancers in the Paris Opera can still retire with full pension at age 42. The post- World War II rule of Charles de Gaulle is where most of today’s pension structure came from.

The French Pension Reform and the Fate of the French Revolution: An Empirical Comment on the 1954 Paris Decay of the Eiffel Tower

A record 1.3 million people participated in protests on January 19 and the Eiffel Tower was shut down.

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.

Ironically, it was de Gaulle who also provided Macron with the tools — dangerous though they might be to his political future — to ram through the pension reform that he believes is vital to the survival of the French economic system. The constitution that de Gaulle insisted upon as a condition for him to return to office in 1958 and rescue the country from a morass of weak, revolving-door governments, contained Article 49.3. It allows the French President to push a bill through the National Assembly without voting on it. According to official records of the French republic, the provision has been invoked 100 times since it was established.

The government acknowledges it will be difficult for some but insists that it is necessary in an effort to balance the system’s finances.

France has one of the lowest rates of poverty in Europe, and a net pension replacement rate of 74 percent, which is 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 more workers paying into the system for every retiree than there are now, but in 2020 it is expected to go down to 1.7 as projections show.

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. He said that once you have said there isn’t a problem, there isn’t a problem in the long term.

Editor’s Note: David A. Andelman, a contributor to CNN, twice winner of the Deadline Club Award, is a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor, author of “A Red Line in the Sand: Diplomacy, Strategy, and the History of Wars That Might Still Happen” and blogs at Andelman Unleashed. He formerly was a foreign correspondent for The New York Times and Paris correspondent for CBS News. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.

Macron’s Paris Fire: From Paris Fire to the Spite-of-The-Saw Regime During the Macron Regeneration Protests

An American visitor to Paris was walking home from dinner when she witnessed the cars on fire. They were throwing tear gas at each other. To get to my hotel in the Rue des Capucines, the street was on fire from both ends! Is Paris burning? In my street YES!! Now in my room I can smell smoke.”

Of course, this is not the first such conflagration Macron has weathered. The yellow vest movement brought French demonstrators into the streets to express their anger over rising fuel prices. The French eventually lose their patience with strikes and unrest. That worked before. Macron spoke to the nation, laid out the costs and dropped fuel taxes that were a key part of the protests. The stakes are higher and it is not unreasonable forMacron to find a similar path out of this crisis.

From the far-right acolytes of Marine Le Pen to the far left of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (unbowed) party, the political sharks are all smelling blood on the water, even though the next elections aren’t for another four years.

Buses, subways and public works across France shuddered to a halt, barricades went up in streets and were set ablaze. Garbage collectors walked off in protest of the rise in retirement age to 59 from 57, which is among many exceptions for earlier full retirement due to the nature of their jobs. The streets of Paris have been filled with more than 7,000 tons of garbage, making it one of the world’s most prolific rat colonies.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/20/opinions/macron-pension-reform-protests-andelman/index.html

Can the pension reform be invoked again in Parliament if a new prime minister becomes a no-confidence voter? How will the French public feel about the situation?

As it happens, it has already been invoked 11 times under Macron’s prime minister, Elisabeth Borne, more times than under any of her 15 predecessors except for one — Michel Rocard, who used 49.3 some 28 times against an utterly hostile Parliament. The provision was only invoked 10 times over the course of 10 years.

Effectively, the various political currents coursing through the halls of Parliament have some tough decisions to make. A great gift to any member of Parliament that would have considered voting for the pension reform is that they don’t have to publicly declare themselves for a unpopular piece of legislation.

Will they do better if a new prime minister is appointed, after a no-confidence vote? For that matter, would France even do better with its status quo, a retirement age of 62? Not in my view either, both in Macron and myself.

When they think that they do not have enough time, have enough means to do a good job, to produce good quality work, good products and good service, they find it is not a good job, because they can’t recognize this kind of job.