France’s leftwing trade unionists staged their fourth mass demonstration against President Emmanuel Macron’s pension reforms on Thursday, even as ministers inched towards a deal with a moderate labour federation to try to end some of the longest public sector strikes in the country’s postwar history, reports the Financial Times.
Finance minister Bruno Le Maire has promised financial help for small businesses such as hotels, shops and restaurants in the Paris area crippled first by the anti-government gilets jaunes protests last year and now by strikes on the capital’s trains, metro lines and buses.
The strike over pensions by some train drivers since December 5 at SNCF, the state railway, has cost the company €700m in lost revenue and is now in its 36th day, making it the longest since the group was created in 1938. Overall, the stoppages are the most serious in France since the uprising that erupted among students in May 1968.
“We must find a compromise,” a senior government official said this week.
Protesters and strikers marched in scores of French cities in demonstrations led by unions including the Communist-aligned Confédération Générale du Travail, which is influential in the SNCF.
The Paris march, smaller than the first such protest in December, ended in desultory exchanges of missiles and tear gas between a hard core of violent demonstrators and the police around the Saint-Augustin church and the Gare Saint-Lazare. Philippe Martinez, CGT leader, boasted on Thursday morning of 216 planned demonstrations against the pension reform.
“There have never been so many,” he told Europe 1 radio. Unimpressed by a series of concessions and changes to the pension reform made by the government, strikers have also called for further demonstrations on Saturday that will be joined by the moderate Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail, the country’s largest union with more than 600,000 members.