It was a speech strongly hoped for by the French. After weeks of debate, the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, finally spoke on Wednesday about the pension reform vote and the social anger that is currently rising in France. During a thirty-minute interview, he returned to the wild demonstrations that have taken place since the use of 49.3, while explaining a pension reform rejected by the French. Words that did not convince if we are to believe the reactions of the unions and the opposition, gathered to denounce a set of striking untruths for the Head of State.
Emmanuel Macron did not convince the French this Wednesday, March 22 during an interview aimed at expressing himself on the pension reform and at calming a social climate under high tension. According to an Odoxa-Backbone poll carried out for Le Figaro, the intervention of the President of the Republic, followed by 10 million French people, could, on the contrary, have aggravated the ambient anger. Indeed, nearly 76% of French people said they were not seduced by this speech, which elevates this interview as “the worst intervention in the history of Emmanuel Macron’s post-tests”. The French were thus not sensitive to his comments on the usefulness of this pension reform, nor on his future projects around new laws to be carried out.
At the same time, the unions strongly pointed out the set of untruths expressed yesterday by the Head of State. Thus, despite the figures announced by Emmanuel Macron, the need for a pension reform following the increase in the number of retirees is not retained by the Pensions Orientation Council (COR). On the subject of retirement pensions, the President of the Republic also ruled out the possibility of asking companies to make an effort, explaining that “this is not how pensions work” while retirement pensions are financed by employee and employer contributions.
If the President of the Republic said he was ready to “endorse unpopularity” in order to implement the pension reform, the unions and the opposition reacted strongly to listening to Emmanuel Macron. Many thus speak of the contempt of the Head of State with regard to social mobilization, in particular the leader of the CGT Philippe Martinez who explained “a lack of knowledge of our system”. He went so far as to speak of a President of the Republic “who doesn’t care about [their] face [with] remarks [which] are contempt for the millions of people who parade”.
The secretary of the CFDT Laurent Berger abounded in this direction by accusing the President of the Republic of “lie” around the pension reform. He thus explained that Emmanuel Macron “had taken up [their] ambition for a universal system” and that he “was remaking history and lying about the CFDT to hide his inability to find a majority to vote for his unjust reform”. For his part, Jean-Luc Mélenchon was also particularly shocked by the “arrogance” of Emmanuel Macron with regard to difficult careers while he “just removed the criteria of arduousness”.
Other members of the opposition also rebelled against Emmanuel Macron’s remarks, such as Marine Tondelier, national secretary of Europe Ecologie Les Verts, who announced that she was “frozen by the president’s demonstration of self-satisfaction [having held ] offensive words”. Deputy LR Aurélien Pradié also expressed his dissatisfaction with a President of the Republic who “does not understand the immense fractures of the Nation” and who “plays with fire”. As for Marine Le Pen, she evoked “mechanical and dilatory remarks, from a man apparently more and more alone, who seems to have lost all sense of reality”.
It must be said that the President of the Republic has chosen to underestimate the current social mobilization by judging that the challenge against the reform was less important than the previous ones. A new untruth from Emmanuel Macron in the face of the 1.28 million demonstrators everywhere in France on March 7, according to the Ministry of the Interior, and 3.5 million according to the CGT. Either the strongest mobilization in the history of the Fifth Republic, pending the result of the new day of strike scheduled for Thursday, March 23.
