France faces huge disruption amid pension protests
PARIS: France woke up to a day of paralysis on Tuesday, with transport blockages, mass strikes and demonstrations hitting the West European country for the second time in a month to protest a planned reform to raise the retirement age.
About a million people were expected to take to the streets nationwide, a police source told Agence France-Presse (AFP), rallying against plans to hike the age of retirement from 62 to 64.
Some 11,000 police were mobilized across the country, with 4,000 deployed in the capital Paris, where several hundred extremist troublemakers were expected, according to the Interior Ministry.
On January 19, some 1.1 million took to the streets in rallies against the proposed shake-up, the largest protests since the last major round of pension reform in 2010.
Millions had to find alternative means of transport on Tuesday, work from home or take time off to look after their schoolage children, with workers in transport and education sectors among those staging walkouts.
“This is about more than pensions. It is about what kind of society we want,” 59-year-old university professor Martine Beugnet told AFP, saying she would take part in Tuesday’s protest.
Most Paris metro and suburban rail services were severely restricted, the capital’s transport operator RATP said.
Intercity travel was also disrupted, with just one in three high-speed trains likely to run, railway company SNCF predicted.
Air travel is to be less badly affected, with national carrier Air France saying it would cancel one in 10 short and medium-haul services, but long-distance flights would be unaffected.
Only minor disruptions were expected on international train services, including the Eurostar.
About half of all nursery and primary school teachers would be striking, the main teachers’ union Snuipp-FSU said.
France’s oil industry was mostly paralyzed, with the hard-left CGT union at energy giant TotalEnergies reporting between 75 and 100 percent of workers on strike.
Sixty-one percent of French people support the protest movement, a poll by the OpinionWay survey group showed on Monday — an increase of 3 percentage points from January 12.
The most controversial part of the overhaul is hiking the minimum retirement age.
But the changes are also to increase the number of years people have to make contributions before they can receive a full pension.
President Emmanuel Macron put pensions reform at the heart of his reelection campaign last year.
The 45-year-old centrist said on Monday the changes were “essential when we compare ourselves to the rest of Europe.”
France has the lowest qualifying age for a state pension among major European economies.
The government has said the changes are necessary to guarantee the future financing of the pension system, which is forecast to tip into deficit in the next few years.
But opponents point out that the system is not in trouble, quoting the head of the independent Pensions Advisory Council as saying: “Pension spending is not out of control, it’s relatively contained.”
The government has signaled there could be wiggle room on some of the suggested measures, but Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne has said raising the retirement age was “non-negotiable.”