President Emmanuel Macron is facing his biggest test since the “Yellow Vest” uprising shook his presidency a year ago, as unions representing railway and transport workers and many others in the public sector called for a walkout on Thursday to protest changes to France’s uniquely generous pension system, reports The New York Times.
The strike threatens to paralyze France for several days or more, with teachers, students, hospital staff, police officers, garbage collectors, truck drivers and airline workers all expected to join.
The fresh round of social unrest is once again calling into question Mr. Macron’s top-down management style, a big factor in last year’s protest over stagnating wages and dwindling living standards. He promised then to bring more voices into his decision-making but has wound up dictating another overhaul that has created deep unease in France.
There is also now concern at the top at the reaction from the street, with one senior official at the Élysée Palace, the French presidency, acknowledging that the pension overhaul had the potential to galvanize disparate parts of the opposition. “Pension reforms create anxiety. It’s not an easy sell,” said the official, who could only be quoted anonymously under French rules.
The Yellow Vests say they will join the new protest — unlike the unions, they have been successful at extracting concessions from the government — as will Mr. Macron’s opponents, right and left, and a wide spectrum of unions, though not the centrist French Democratic Confederation of Labor.
Publicly, government officials have been busy assuring journalists and others that they are not afraid of the strike action, which has come to be called “the Dec. 5 wall.” But the walkout and the underlying social discontent call into question Mr. Macron’s apparent triumph over the Yellow Vest movement, seen up until now as a crucial moment of his reformist presidency. Unions are predicting a huge turnout on Thursday.
Jean Garrigues, a political historian at the University of Orléans, said, “The victory doesn’t seem to have rehabilitated Macron.” This week’s protest is “the reflection of a crisis in French society, one that can explode at any moment,” he added. “There’s real anxiety over the future.”
Mr. Macron’s hasty $19 billion check to bolster purchasing power in the form of tax cuts and income supplements for low earners did help tamp down the Yellow Vest demonstrations.
But some analysts, like the economist Daniel Cohen of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, have pointed out that the cash did not settle underlying French social dislocation linked to globalization. The senior Élysée official acknowledged that citizens were in effect saying that they had not seen enough improvement to their daily lives.
The strike has been called to protest Mr. Macron’s proposed overhaul of the byzantine French pension system, one of the world’s most complicated and generous, which is currently headed for a deficit of about $19 billion. Some railway workers, for instance, can retire at 52, and average retirement ages are among the lowest in the industrialized world.
The official retirement age is 62, but many retire before. Pensions as a percentage of working-age salaries are among the world’s highest, hovering at around 70 percent, and often even higher for state workers. Retirements tend to be long in France, and public leisure facilities — concerts, museums, theaters — are often full of vigorous retirees with lots of time on their hands.
The results of this complex system of 42 different pension plans are remarkable: France has among the world’s lowest old-age poverty rates, and average incomes of those over 65 are slightly higher than incomes under that age, a global rarity.