MORE THAN A MILLION PROTEST MACRON’S PENSION PLAN IN STREETS OF FRANCE

Fri 20 January 2023:

More than a million people have joined a day of protests and strikes, according to France’s interior ministry, against plans to push back the age of retirement, from sixty two to sixty four.

Some eighty thousand protesters took to the streets of Paris, with demonstrations in two hundred more French cities.

President Emmanuel Macron called the reforms “just and responsible” – but they are facing, a make-or-break moment.

Police made arrests on the edges of the march in central Paris amid clashes with officers in the early afternoon. Police said 15 people were arrested before the Paris march and 15 during it, for offences such as carrying illegal weapons or throwing projectiles. Shopkeepers around the Place de la République boarded up windows and shopfronts after the authorities warned of a possibility of vandalism after the marches or black bloc-style tactics.

The strikes severely disrupted public transport and many schools were closed.

Protests took place across France, in Nantes, Lyon, Bordeaux, Marseille and Toulouse, as train drivers, public sector workers and refinery staff walked out.

Under the proposals outlined by the prime minister earlier this month, from twenty twenty seven, people will have to work fourty three years to qualify for a full pension, as opposed to fourty two years now.

Hailed by the government as a vital measure to safeguard France’s share-out pension system, the reform is proving deeply unpopular among the public, with sixty eight percent saying they are opposed, according to an IFOP poll this week.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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