Government is banking on support from Senators belonging to the conservative Les Republicains (LR) party, who favour raising the minimum legal retirement age from 62 to 64, and having citizens work longer to obtain a full pension.
The events of last weekend have been revealing about the state of French politics and the balance of political power. The elections for the Senate, in which the Right consolidated its position in France's upper chamber, showed the limits and weakness of President Emmanuel Macron's government. At the same time the relatively modest turnout for a protest march in Paris organised by the radical left La France Insoumise highlighted the lack of major political opposition. But as Hubert Huertas says, this does not mean that opposition to the government's measures has melted away.
It was their secret. Every Christmas from 2003 to 2014, the venerable senators belonging to former French President Nicolas Sarkozy's UMP party, recently renamed Les Républicains, received a hand-out of around 8,000 euros per person on the quiet, on top of their ample salaries and expenses. It was described by the senators themselves as their annual tip or 'Christmas box'. Now the new chairman of their Senate group has decided to put an end to the practice. Mathilde Mathieu reports on yet another example of the Senate gravy-train, which emerges amid a continuing judicial investigation into suspected money laundering and misuse of public funds by the UMP Senate group.
French Senate president Gérard Larcher entered office on a high-profile campaign to cut spending and impose budgetary discipline within the French parliament's notoriously lavish upper house. Mediapart this month obtained access to the payroll of the president's private staff, and it reveals anything but austerity. The average monthly salary is 8,500 euros while his principal private secretary earns more than 19,000 euros, just a few hundred euros short of the pay of French Prime Minister François Fillon. Mathilde Mathieu and Michaël Hajdenberg report.
