The pension reform could be partly maintained according to press reports. This reform had been hotly contested in the street. The Élysée has neither denied nor confirmed.
Will the government put pension reform on the table? The head of state wants to put “partly” the reform “on the bench”, according to France Info which quotes the entourage of the president. Emmanuel Macron is said to be attached to the “social justice measures” contained in the text. He would thus like to continue “the spirit of the program” for which he thinks he was elected in 2017. These assertions were neither confirmed nor denied by the Elysée.
The coronavirus epidemic has suspended parliamentary examination of the pension reform until further notice. “I have decided that all the reforms underway must be suspended, starting with pension reform,” Emmanuel Macron said in his speech on March 16. Faced with the avalanche of amendments (more than 41,000), Prime Minister Edouard Philippe had finally announced fifteen days earlier the use of article 49.3 of the Constitution to have the text adopted without the vote of the deputies. The pension reform was initially to be discussed in April in the Senate.
Doubts in the majority
In May, the LREM general delegate Stanislas Guérini had expressed serious doubts about the future of the pension reform. “I am not sure that we will be able to carry out the pension reform by the end of the quinquennium,” he announced in The voice of the North.
For his part, the President of the National Assembly Richard Ferrand was also reserved on the text in an interview with The South Dispatch sometime in April: “I tend to think that we should never put back what we think is right. But it is obvious that projects that bring people together will be more useful than those that create divisions.”
Record mobilization
It is an understatement to say that this pension reform project had helped to divide the French. For two months, between December 2019 and February 2010, pensions have mobilized hundreds of thousands of people on the streets: seven national days of action (between 806,000 people according to the Interior Ministry and 1,800,000 according to the CGT for the most followed days), more than half of the teachers in the schools on strike on December 5, 2019, up to 80% of the train drivers and controllers on strike and the longest social conflict of the SNCF, wild cuts electricity, lawyers on strike, etc.
Faced with the mobilization of part of France against the text, and less than two years from the next presidential election, Emmanuel Macron will he take the political risk of putting many French people back on the street? A parliamentary source, cited by The world in April, mentioned a shooting window in September to resume consideration of the text on pensions.
Several reforms suspended
The pension reform is obviously not the only five-year reform postponed until further notice. The unemployment compensation reform which provides for new rules has already been postponed until September 1, 2020. Also postponed the audiovisual bill and the fight against hateful content on the internet.
Other important reforms are planned in Parliament in the coming months: the bioethics bill, the dependency law or the research programming law. To this must be added the finance bill and the social security finance bill, which must be adopted before the end of the year. It is going to stop in Parliament.
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