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London: Emmanuel Macron’s plan to raise France’s retirement age is now reality. After clearing its final hurdle when the nation’s highest constitutional authority endorsed most of the proposed law on Friday, the president wasted no time in enacting it.
Based on the official French gazette, the Journel Officiel, newspaper Le Monde reported the law was promulgated in the early hours of Saturday, delivering a much-needed political win for the embattled president after months of protests.
Security measures were put in place throughout central Paris on Friday ahead of the highly anticipated verdict at the Constitutional Council building at Palais Royal, while unions and student groups held protests across the city, in Toulouse, Lyon and elsewhere.
The nine-member council, made up mainly of former politicians and senior civil servants, ruled that most of the proposed law – which increases the minimum retirement age from 62 to 64 to secure a state pension – was valid under the constitution and enacted legally. Macron had 15 days to enact the bill.
“One can’t govern a country against its citizens,” Sophie Binet, the head of France’s far-left CGT union, said at a protest after the ruling. “We are calling on the president to get away from his stubborn, obstinate dogmatism.”
Macron and his prime minister, Elisabeth Borne, are now likely to seek to move on from a troubled three months when millions turned out to protest and strike – some violently – against their plan to shore up the finances of France’s costly and complex pensions system.
The pension protests – which began in January with strikes that paralysed oil refineries, disrupted trains and schools and caused nuclear power reactors to lower their output – took a more intense turn in mid-March when the reform was pushed through parliament.
Macron’s government survived two votes of no confidence filed by opposition parties in parliament, but marches and walkouts organised by the unions gave way to more spontaneous demonstrations and clashes with police in cities like Paris and Bordeaux, as protesters set fire to piles of uncollected garbage.
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