March 12 () –
The French Senate has given the green light on Saturday night to the controversial pension reform project promoted by the president, Emmanuel Macron, despite the massive demonstrations against the measure.
The legislators have given the go-ahead to the bill with 195 votes in favor and 112 votes against, according to the scrutiny of the Upper House, which indicates that the votes opposed to the approval of the measure correspond mainly to the socialist, communist and ecologist.
The Prime Minister of France, Élisabeth Borne, has indicated that this measure, adopted “after one hundred hours of debate”, is “a decisive step to carry out a reform that ensures the future” of the pensions of French citizens.
For his part, the country’s Minister of Public Accounts, Gabriel Attal, stressed that the pension reform, which has “a single objective to be able to continue paying 20 million pensions each month in the near future”, is “for the French who do not They have another patrimony than their work, so we are working to save this system”.
Hours before, a million people have demonstrated throughout France to protest against the reform of the pension system, according to the organizers, who have indicated that 300,000 of them would have concentrated only on the streets of Paris.
The Paris Police Prefecture has placed the number of attendees in the capital at 48,000, while the Ministry of the Interior has confirmed 368,000 protesters in 251 rallies and demonstrations recorded throughout France.
This is the day with the least participation since the beginning of the mobilizations, seven weeks ago, far from the 963,000 on February 11 or the record of 1.28 million on March 7, according to police figures. “The days are not compared, they add up,” argued the general secretary of the National Union of Autonomous Trade Unions (UNSA), Laurent Escure.
The Government’s plan proposes raising the official retirement age from 62 to 64, extending the years of contribution necessary to receive the maximum pension and eliminating the specific regimes that exist today for certain sectors.
