Is the French govt doomed; pension reform?

[Lilith7]

The French don't seem too happy about their govt trying to change the age for the pension - only be two years but perhaps the view is that this would be the thin edge of the wedge & once begun, it may well continue with further changes to the age.
They seem only to have elected this govt because the alternative - Marine Le Pen was a step too far.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64986741

"Faith in conventional politics and the parliamentary system is in fact at rock-bottom. How else to explain the collapse of Gaullists and Socialists, who ran France for half a century, and the rise of the far-right and far-left?

President Macron encouraged the death of the ancien régime, that old order which he exploited to pose as the lone moderate, picking sensible bits from programmes of left and right.


Meanwhile, the tenor of public debate was steadily debased.
The left tabled literally thousands of amendments to the pensions bill, making its conventional passage impossible. Opponents described as "brutal" and "inhuman" a reform which in other countries would have seemed perfectly anodyne.

One left-wing MP posed outside the Assembly with his foot on a ball painted with the head of the labour minister; fearing mob violence, a leading pro-Macron MP called on Friday for police protection for her colleagues.

With scenes of looting and urban violence, hills of rotting rubbish on the streets of Paris and other French cities, and the promise of more crippling strikes to come, this is the unedifying atmosphere as the country enters the next crucial phase in the crisis.

In practice, even the so-called "transpartisan" motion tabled by a centrist group in parliament - supposedly more liable to create a consensus between the mutually hostile far-left and far-right - would be unlikely to get the numbers.

The government hopes that reality will at some point set in, and that most people will dejectedly accept the inevitable.

Quite possibly a sacrificial victim will eventually have to made - no doubt in the form of Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne.

But for now, the mood is too ugly for that.


In the immediate term, to every petrol depot blockaded, to every bin uncollected, and to every window smashed will be joined the accompanying refrain: "Blame 49:3. Blame Macron."