First modification:
The Government of the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, made the decision to approve the pension system reform project with the activation of article 49.3, ignoring the vote of the National Assembly and causing a great political and social upheaval in the country . In that parliamentary instance, the project did not have sufficient guarantees to obtain the necessary votes, despite having been previously approved in the Senate. We analyze the issue in this edition of El Debate.
Arguing a risk in the fall of the pension system in France, the Macron government proposes a reform with which it seeks, among other things, to increase the retirement age from 62 to 64 years.
Thus, France would have a retirement age similar to that of the rest of the countries of the European Union, in which the average age is 65 years.
The Government assures that the measure is necessary since the country’s population is getting older and the young are not increasing significantly, endangering the pension system.
However, the project has generated the anger of the unions, the opposition and the civil population, which has been demonstrating massively throughout the country for several days.
What political cost does this decision have for President Macron and for Prime Minister Elizabeth Borne? Is this the spark that will ignite large-scale social demonstrations in France? What do the unions say? What do young people who already have precarious working conditions say? To analyze the topic we have invited:
-Florian Lafarge, political analyst and former adviser to the French Government.
-Nicolás Murillo, coordinator of the Institute of Advanced Studies for Development of the Externado de Colombia University.