Emmanuel Macron will speak out as anger simmers over pension reform

PARIS: French President Emmanuel Macron will give a television interview, his office said on Tuesday, after his government rebuffed two no-confidence votes in parliament over a controversial pensions overhaul that sparked mass protests.
The Macron government used a constitutional measure to pass the reform, which raises the retirement age from 62 to 64, without a vote in the lower house National Assemblysparking allegations of “denial of democracy” by angry protesters.
His office said he would go live to answer questions from reporters from broadcasters TF1 and France 2 at 1:00 p.m. (1200 GMT) on Wednesday, having remained largely silent on pension changes in the weeks before the stormy parliamentary session where he been pushed last week.
On Monday, the government survived two no-confidence motions tabled by opposition groups, one of which failed by just nine votes in the 577-seat National Assembly.
Formal passage of the reform on Tuesday appears unlikely to defuse the biggest domestic crisis since Macron’s re-election last year, with daily protests in cities across the country turning violent at times.
Police arrested 234 people in the city of Paris alone on Monday night during tense clashes between protesters and security forces, a police source said, with several groups burning trash cans, bicycles and other items.
Similar scenes were reported in other French cities, including Dijon and Strasbourg, where protesters smashed the windows of a department store, AFP correspondents said, with police arresting 287 people across the country. , the source said.
Macron must meet his Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne Tuesday, as well as the president of the Assembly, Yael Braun-Pivet of her centrist Renaissance party, and the right-wing president of the Senate, Gerard Lacher.
He will then meet with Renaissance lawmakers in the evening, his office said, as opponents pledged to continue protests.
“Nothing will weaken the determination of the workers,” said the hard-line CGT union.
A new series of strikes and demonstrations were called on Thursday and are expected to again paralyze public transport in several regions.
There has also been an ongoing garbage collectors’ strike in Paris and other cities, resulting in the accumulation of unsightly and unsanitary piles of rubbish in the French capital.
The government also said on Tuesday it would requisition workers from a fuel depot in Fos-sur-Mer near the southern city of Marseille, as petrol stations across the country begin to dry up during a a strike by refinery workers.
The far-right camp intends to seize the Constitutional Council.
Borne said she had already asked the Constitutional Court to check the law while the left-wing opposition filed a request for a referendum on the issue.
“I am determined to continue to lead the necessary transformations in our country with my ministers and to devote all my energy to meeting the expectations of our fellow citizens,” Borne said in a statement to AFP after the votes of no confidence.
The future of Borne, named France’s second female prime minister by Macron following her election victory over the far-right, remains uncertain after she failed to secure a parliamentary majority for reform.
Government insiders and observers have raised fears that France is heading for yet another round of violent anti-government protests, just a few years after the “Yellow vest“The movement shook the country from 2018-2019.
One of the Republicans who voted to overthrow the government, Aurélien Pradie, later said Macron should withdraw the “poison law”.
“It is obvious today that the government has a problem of legitimacy and the president cannot remain a spectator of this situation,” Pradie told BFM television.
Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader who challenged Macron in the 2022 election, said Borne “should leave or be forced to resign by the president”.
A survey on Sunday showed that Macron’s personal rating was at its lowest level since the peak of the “yellow vests” protest movement in 2019, with just 28% of those polled having a positive opinion of him.
Macron argued that the pension changes are necessary to avoid crippling deficits in the coming decades linked to France’s aging population.
Opponents of the reform say it places an unfair burden on low wages, women and people in physically demanding jobs.
Opinion polls have consistently shown that two-thirds of French people oppose the changes.

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