12.03.2023 00:19
(Akt. 12.03.2023 00:30)
Numerous participants in rallies
©APA/AFP
The French Senate voted in favor of the government’s controversial pension reform in its first reading. 195 senators voted in favor of the law on Sunday night, 112 rejected it and 37 abstained. Even if the vote in the heated dispute over the reform is a success for France’s center government, the project is not over yet. Protests once morest the plans broke out once more on Saturday.
The government under President Emmanuel Macron wants to gradually raise the retirement age from 62 to 64. In addition, the number of payment years required for a full pension should increase more quickly.
The retirement age is currently 62 years. In fact, however, retirement begins later on average: those who have not paid in long enough to be entitled to full remuneration work longer. At the age of 67 there will then be a pension without any deductions, regardless of how long it has been paid in – the government wants to keep this. She wants to increase the monthly minimum pension to around 1,200 euros.
The government is sending the reform through parliament in an accelerated process. The text was therefore passed to the Senate without a first-reading vote on the entire reform in the National Assembly. A commission of MPs and senators is scheduled to meet on Wednesday to find a compromise between the National Assembly and the Senate. Both chambers of Parliament must then agree.
The center government does not have an absolute majority in the National Assembly. She is hoping for the votes of the conservative Républicains for the reform. While the conservatives in the Senate now agreed, the faction in the lower house was recently divided. There is therefore speculation as to whether the government will resort to a special article in the constitution and ultimately push the law through without a vote by the National Assembly.
Hundreds of thousands of people across the country protested once more on Saturday once morest the pension reform. There were larger rallies in Paris, Nice and Toulouse. The Interior Ministry put the number of demonstrators at 368,000. Unions, on the other hand, had expected up to a million people. 1.28 million people demonstrated on Tuesday. The unions called for further demonstrations and strikes on Wednesday.
