Anti-pension plan stir: Staff block Louvre museum gates
PARIS: The Louvre Museum in Paris was closed to the public on Monday when its workers took part in the wave of French protest strikes against the government’s unpopular pension reform plans.
Dozens of Louvre employees blocked the entrance, prompting the museum to announce it would be temporarily closed. The demonstrators toted banners and flags in front of the Louvre’s famed pyramid, where President Emmanuel Macron had celebrated his presidential victory in 2017. They demanded the repeal of the new pension law that raises the retirement age from 62 to 64.
The show-business, broadcasting and culture branch of the CGT union tweeted an image of the Mona Lisa with an aged and wrinkled face, with the words: “64 it’s a No!”
The action comes on the eve of another nationwide protest planned for Tuesday against the bill — and as Macron holds a meeting with Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne to discuss the way forward. The Louvre is always closed on Tuesdays, so staff protested a day earlier.
French President Emmanuel Macron’s government has ignited a firestorm of anger with unpopular pension reforms that he railroaded through parliament and which, most notably, push the legal retirement age from 62 to 64.
Furious not just with the prospect of working for longer but also with the way Macron imposed it, his opponents have switched to full-on disobedience mode.
They’re regularly striking and demonstrating and threatening to make his second and final term as president even more difficult than his first. It, too, was rocked by months of protests — often violent — by so-called yellow vest campaigners against social injustice.
Critics accuse Macron of effectively ruling by decree, likening him to France’s kings of old. Their reign finished badly: In the French Revolution, King Louis XVI ended up on the guillotine. There’s no danger of that happening to Macron. But hobbled in parliament and contested on the streets piled high with reeking garbage uncollected by striking workers, he’s being given a tough lesson, again, about French people power.