#france pension reform

[kneedeepincynade]

The shaoshan collective shows its full Solidarity with our comrades in France, Macron will not win! Don't stop until the bourgeoisie have fallen!

[nando161mando]

Rehabilitation, not Devastation. Fuck The Police.

[sszeemedia]

France pension reform: Macron's government to raise retirement age to 64 as it survives no-confidence vote

The French pension reform initiated by Emmanuel Macron has sparked an anti-government protest across the nation. On Monday, President Macron’s government narrowly escaped the no-confidence motion with 278 votes in favour, falling short of 287 votes. The vote was tabled by the centrist MPs and if it would have been successful, the president would have had to call new elections or go for a new…

[the-bibrarian]

I see a lot of incomprehension online about our pension reform and the anger it generates in France, and what it often boils down to is "why are they so angry, 64 is plenty young to retire?"

I don't agree, but even if I did I would still oppose the reform. Here are some of the reasons why:

We already need 43 full years of work and tax contributions to be able to retire. Which means college-educated people were never going to retire at 64 anyway, let alone 62. This reform is aimed at people who start working early, mostly in low-paying jobs.

There's very little provision made in this law for hard/dangerous/manual labour.

There's no provision made for women who stop working to raise their children (51% of women already retire without a "complete career," which means they only retire on a partial pension, vs. 25% of men).

At 64, 1/3 of the poorest workers will already be dead. In France, between the richest and the poorest men, there's a 13 years gap in life expectancy.

Beyond life expectancy, at that age a lot of people (especially poorer, non-college educated) have too many health-related issues to be able to work. Not only is it cruel to ask them to work longer, if they can't work at all that's two more years to hold on with no pension

Unemployment in France is still fairly high (7%). Young people already have a hard time finding work, and this is going to make things even harder for them

Macron cut taxes on the rich and lost the country around 16 Billions € in tax revenue. Our estimated pension deficit should peak at 12 Billions worst case scenario.

While I'm on wealth redistribution (no, not soviet style, but I think there should be a cap on wealth concentration. Nobody needs to be a billionaire.): some of the massive profits of last year should go to workers and to the state to be redistributed, including to fund pensions. The state subsidized companies and corporations during the pandemic, Macron even said "no matter the cost" and spent 206 Billions € on businesses. Now he's going after the poorest workers in the country for an hypothetical 12 Billions??

Implicit in all of this is the question of systemic racism. French workers from immigrant families are already more likely to have started their careers early, to have low-paying jobs, are less likely to be college-educated, more at risk for disabilities and chronic illnesses, etc., so this is going to disproportionately affect them

This is not even touching on the fact that he didn't let lawmakers vote on it, meaning he knew he wouldn't get a majority of votes in parliament, or that 70% of the population is against this law. Pushing it through anyway is blatant authoritarianism.

TL;DR: This is only tangentially about retirement age. The reform will make life harder for people with low incomes, or with no higher education, for manual workers, for women—mothers especially, for POC, for people with disabilities or chronic conditions, etc. This is about solidarity.

Hope (sincerely) this helps.

[nullnvoid911]

French police anti-crime brigade (BAC) at a demonstration in protest of pension reform that raised the age of retirement.

police_urgence_photographie, February 13, 2023

[queerism1969]

[noirviridis]

this is how it feels to be french right now:

(it's not)

[sam-blackbird]

Hi! If you’re a foreigner looking at France right now (march 2023), you could wonder: “WTF is happening there?!”

I’m French, so let me explain (from what I understood, thanks to friends’ explanation and researches on my own, the government things are not very clear, perhaps on purpose).

If you have no clues, there are currently a lot of demonstrations (and some riots) and strikes. Some are violents and some are peaceful, depending, but I’ll come to that later. First of all: why? Because of a reform on the retirement, basically.

You may think, well, going from 62 to 64 years old don’t seem excessive, right? But that’s only the visible part of the iceberg actually. First, that move was explain by the government by saying it will avoid the collapsing of the system (of retirement). HOWEVER, the minimal age of retirement, 64, can only be 64 if you have: -- a full career (without any unemployed time, and/or part-time work) -- began to work early (like 16/18 years old) -- your 43 annuities (basically, it means that you have to work 43 years, if I understood clearly)

With all being wrote, it means that for a majority of French ppl, counts don’t had up: most of the ppl will have to work until around their 65-67 years.

Moreover, if you leave before the minimal age of retirement (which will be 64), you will not receive entirely your retirement money.

We were told that that reform will allow to save the French pension system --as it will allow to augment the retirement money up to 1200€ (euros). But the money can be took somewhere else, like in the super riches pockets for example, by taking them up to something like 2%, for the system to be fiable. Furthermore, only a minority of French people will obtain these 1200€, as you need a full career without any stop in it to gain it. So that reform penalizes everybody, especially precarious people and women.

That’s why a lot of people are angry right now in France.

On top of that, Elizabeth Born, the French Prime Minister (she is just under the French president in the power ladder in France), pass that reform against the Parlement agreement, using the 49th article of the constitution, paragraph 3 (we call it “49.3″).

That’s why we are angry. That’s why we demonstrate. That’s why there are strikes.

Most of them are non-violent, or at least, the violence don’t come from the demonstrators, but rather from the police officers --who seems to think they have all the rights because they wear the uniform. There are some police brutality (and if some French see that and needs some advices in case of police arrestations, I can provide them). There are also some riots and some thugs who breaks windows and/or stole things and/or deteriorates things / urban furnitures, but it’s not the majority of it (despite what BFM TV claims) (btw, be careful of what you’re watching, some images show the demonstrations as riots).

A lot of young people participates in these demonstrations, because it’s our future that’s at stake. We’re angry. We’ve had enough. All our life (I take my case as an example, for context, I’ll be 20 this year), we’ve been told our planet is dying, that we won’t be able to own a house (after the 2008 economic crisis), and now that we’ll have to work until our old age? We say: that’s enough. So we’re revolting. (some of us even say it’s time to guillotine Macron, to do a remake of 1789)

Some of us use the energy of the desperation, because they have nothing to lose, which make them unpredictable (and maybe dangerous). That’s what’s happening, basically.

[helshades]

Could you please explain why people are so opposed to the pension reform? I'm trying to understand, but living in a country where you can retire at 67 but keep working until 70 if you wish, and everyone is fine with that, I feel I must have missed something.

(Happy to be sent resources if you don't want to make a writeup!)

Same anon as before, forgot to mention I read french so no trouble if you send me french articles or posts. (That is, if you answer the ask, if so thanks in advance!)

It's really not on you, but your Ask did depress me a tad. It aligned with many comments I've spotted across the media coverage of the current French crisis in foreign countries, and most public reactions to it. The worst ones are definitely racist, along the lines of mocking them French that never want to work, but I know the most benign to be genuine: how come the French get to retire so early in life still, and why are they protesting an apparently necessary, surely inevitable, evidently inexorable raise of the legal age for a full pension, when everybody else must retire later in life, which they deem to be entirely natural and normal?

I was about to ask you how did you think the French got to retire as early as 55–60 years of age not that long ago (62 today) if not because of their infamous propensity to go on strike and protest a lot in the first place—in truth I was debating with myself on the tone I should adopt to say it—when it struck me suddenly: the crucial part of your comment was not the age for legal retirement in your country... Rather, it was whether or not the people in your country really happen to be ‘fine with that’.

In late January, the man who modified the Swedish pension system twenty years ago, raising the retirement age to 65, was interviewed by French news outlet. Karl Gustaf-Scherman, who used to administer the Swedish social securty, had a recommendation for President Macron: ‘Don't you imitate us and apply our model.’ In reality, most Swedish people can't physically afford to wait till 65 to retire, and have to leave their careers without a full pension: according to a 2019 study ordered by the national retirement fund, 92% of female and 72% of male retirees saw their pensions diminish (and, consequently, their purchasing power) after Sweden opted for this new pension system based on capitalisation and an increase of the retirement age. ‘Mr. President, the only reform you should pass would be a reform à la française’, Gustaf-Scherman concluded.

Again: are you completely certain that in your country, everyone is fine with working till 67, even 70 years of age? How many factory workers do you know, in your entourage, people who spend all day on an assembly line? How many sewage workers do you know? How many nurses and orderlies still lifting patients at 65, how many masons and tilers dreaming of working past their 70th birthday? Do you think it fair to ask a person to retire five years after everyone else because they've known several periods of unemployment in their career, because of some economic recession or because they've had to give birth to the next generation of humans? Do you find it fine to die before you've reached the legal age of retirement with a full pension, never getting to spend quality time with your grandchildren or your friends or helping out at local associations?

Do you find it normal never to get a rest from work before you die?

It's not only that everyone ought to be allowed some respite after serving their country well by participating in producing the national wealth for forty odd years; it is also that all those neoliberal reforms aim to destroy the remnants of old socialised systems across Europe to replace them with a fully capitalised economy. In other words, the point is for the tenants of a globalised market economy to take control of the gross domestic products of each country, open them to speculative funds and get to play with all that wealth—with the systematic privatisation of national markets allowing for unlimited concurrence and speculation.

France's pension system is still partly based on non-wage labour costs that have allowed its nationalised portion to remain afloat and stable since the creation of the Social Security in 1946. Back then, la Sécurité sociale was actually intended to cover all risks of life, but even then the class war was raging on. The entire history of the Social Security centres on the boss class' attempt to snatch the fund's control from the hands of the workers themselves. The move has definitely accelerated within the last four decades (the Eighties have seen the rise of Neoliberalism, as per the Chicago School's teachings, for further illustration, look up Augusto Pinochet's Chile), somewhat exponentially since 2016's Labour Law, implemented when Emmanuel Macron was a youthful minister of Economy who really began tearing the country apart proper, notably to finance his upcoming presidential campaign. The merciless destruction of our once-protective Labour code truly was the point of entry of his Thatchering enterprise...

I reckon no president of the Republic has been as universally detested as most of the French people have come to loathe Emmanuel Macron. The basis of his electorate is a contingent of very wealthy people, most of whom elderly, who share economic interests in the destruction of national sovereignty in favour of privatisation, since they've got, precisely, shares in the big companies that are to profit from the change; and people who simply don't care about the future generations of pensioners.

Trouble is, if Macron got re-elected a year ago, it was only because votes were extremely divided between many parties and because of a successful campaign to hold far-right candidate Marine Le Pen as a compliant scarecrow , presented in all media as the only one opposition to Macron—which meant that all people had to do to oppose Macron would be to vote for her, as it was sure to scandalise the rich and the Woke... Then, all Macron would have to do, which he did, was to present himself as the only one true credible defence in front of the Fascist Menace. The recipe, which was actually brought to perfection in the early 1980s by to-be-president François Mitterrand (using Marine Le Pen's more sinister father, and founder of the National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen), is well and truly tried. Still, one of these days, she's going to get to presidency, and Macron will have been her best supporter.

[blackswaneuroparedux]

The French rioters have all the spirit of freedom without its character; they have all the boldness of anarchy without its genius. The French people want no capacity, and they want no courage, but they want both the advantages and the defects of generous minds.

- Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

I can’t help but think the ghost of Edmund Burke, the British statesman and philosopher who was highly critical of the French Revolution and its associated riots, looking down on the modern streets of Paris and sighing.

In his writings, Burke argued that the revolutionaries' disregard for tradition and established institutions would lead to chaos and anarchy. Whatever one thinks of the pensions reform everything was done constitutionally. There was nothing done undemocratically. This is how the 5th Republic has been set up by de Gaulle as a sort of ‘Republican monarchy’ in 1958. The fate of an unpopular legislation shouldn’t be decided on the streets but in the constitutional court as the 5th Republic was designed to function.Macron hasn’t done anything illegal - even if what he did was politically unpopular and perhaps heavy handed.

Regarding the French riots specifically, Burke expressed his dismay at the mob violence that had erupted in Paris and other cities. He saw the riots as evidence of the revolutionaries' dangerous and misguided approach to governance. In his famous work, "Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke sincerely believed that the French people were capable of great things, but that the revolution had unleashed their worst impulses rather than their best. He argued that the revolutionaries had cast aside the institutions and traditions that had kept French society stable for centuries, and that this would ultimately lead to disaster. Overall, Burke saw the French riots as a symptom of a broader problem with the revolution. He believed that the revolutionaries had overthrown the established order without any clear plan for what would replace it, and that this had left France vulnerable to violence and chaos.

The same can be asked of the rioters and strikers. Every reasonable person, regardless of political alignment, knows that pensions reform have to be undertaken if the French are to continue to enjoy one of the best retirement pensions in Europe as well as also not place a horrendous tax burden on the future young generation when they get older - ironically the potential children of the very young protesters out in full force on the streets.

Certainly the current legislation can be tweaked - it is as currently conceived grossly unfair to women in the work place and those who do labour intensice work. I empathise with those protesting on some of the glaring issues unresolved. But at the same time I don’t think one should throw out the baby with the bath water. Reform can’t be buried forever as if there was no problem to address urgently. Yet no one on the left is willing to put forward good faith solutions to the problem that will continue to be a ticking time bomb for France. Macron’s view of himself as Jupiter certainly grates too. But in their visceral hatred of Macron, they let their passions over rule their reason. That’s very French.

[measuringbliss]

French Politics: Revenge of the Sith

MASTERPOST

Previously...

(click the link to see the animation; the text is otherwise available just below)

During Emmanuel Macron's first mandate, the government had it easy. The main challenge was to try and convince everybody in the country that ~le wokisme~ would lead to the end of civilization. It was also seen that having a presidential candidate financially supported by a certain Russian dictator was somehow acceptable. Adding to that, speaking out against the president became essentially banned on television. The 2022 presidential election was characterized by the left acting stupid, the right acting stupid, and the French middle-class being absolutely clueless. However, the left prepared for the legislative elections by uniting under the NUPES name...

So what can you expect to read about in this post?

In no particular order: bad nicknames, a prolonged game of musical chairs, the end of democracy, and Elon Musk. Yes, Elon Musk is involved.

Terribly, thank you.

With Macron re-elected at the end of April 2022, he had to elect a Prime Minister. As is tradition, his previous Prime Minister, Jean Castex, resigned at the end of Macron's first term, after already having replaced Edouard Philippe in the middle of the mandate.

ENTER: ELISABETH BORNE

1) BORNE-OUT

Borne had previously been minister of transport, minister of ecology and minister of labour, employment and integration. She had quite a reputation, as her previous coworkers had nicknamed her "Madame Borne-out" - an obvious play on her name and "burn-out". She was also nicknamed "Madame Bornée" (Madam Stubborn) and, as recently re-discovered, "Méchanta" (a feminized version of the word "Mean").

Obvious Prime Minister material, right?

So an incompetent wimp was followed by sadistic lady with no empathy. Surely things would go perfectly well.

2) LEGISLATIVES

Next came the time to elect representatives at the National Assembly. Wikipedia describes it as the lower house of the French Parliament, the other, higher house being the Senate. We don't care about the Senate (for now), because the National Assembly is what votes on laws, while the Senate theoretically moderates the NA. The NA is more proeminent and its members are elected by the people.

Basically, the National Assembly is the core battlefield of this game of musical chairs.

I know it may be a bit boring, but you need to understand the basics to understand the drama. Think of it as the opening episodes of a Game of Thrones season, before shit hits the fan.

The National Assembly is constituted by 577 members, which means the majority sits at 289 seats. Usually, the president's party has most seats and thus, can basically do what they want.

"Usually."

As stated in the opening crawl, the French Left united until a single name (while still retaining their individual parties): NUPES. Basically, they would support each other and try to put a single candidate in each territory, instead of fighting against each other. Two communist parties opted out, as they didn't appreciate the main (but weakened) left party taking so much space in the coalition.

So here are the key parliamentary groups: NUPES (the left union), LIOT (utilitarian center union; they don't necessarily share views), Ensemble (Together, Macron's union), UDC (the right) and RN (far-right).

"Nobody won," said Gabriel Attal, the government's spokesperson at the time.

Macron's Ensemble party got 245 seats, so they didn't get a majority. For a while, it was thought the NUPES (the left union) might get the majority, but nope, they "only" got 131 seats - still consequent. A very bad surprise, however, came in the form of the far-right getting 89 seats, a historical score and more than the right union (64). However, Nazi newcomer Eric Zemmour didn't secure any seat for his far-right party so hey, we'll take the small victories.

So let's talk alliances: the Left union had 131 seats (32%). The Right (Macron + UDC) had 245 + 64 (38% + 7%). LIOT was a wild card (or rather, comprised of wild cards). You might assume that Macron's party, definitely right-wing, would get on just fine with the other right union, and strategically-speaking, they have 309 seats, that is, the majority.

However... Les Républicains, UDC's main party on the right, is presided by Eric Ciotti.

Let's play a game.

Here are two Nazis. One pretends to follow the same ideas as the government, and one pretends to follow the same ideas as the government. Who's who? You've got two hours.

So the two Right coalitions don't see eye to eye, but don't worry! Gérald Darmanin, Minister of the Interior, said that Marine Le Pen (far-right) was "too soft". He also continually supports cops. So what I'm saying is that the two Right coalitions are enemies but also very similar. Still, a lot of pride and resentment.

This also means the government is majorly fascist. Surely nothing might go wrong.

3) ENTER: 49.3

What is 49.3?

Pronounced /ka.ʁɑ̃tnœftʁwɑ/, 49.3 is an infamous part of the French Constitution. Americans have the Second Amendment, well we have 49.3.

49.3 exists exactly to face the kind of situation that the National Assembly is in: with no guarantee that a law will be approved by the NA, the Prime Minister might be tempted to bypass it completely. In doing so, the Prime Minister opens the possibility for the opposition to submit a vote of no confidence. If the National Assembly approves the vote of no confidence, the law is rejected and the Government is disassembled - only the President stays. That means organizing new Legislative Elections. If the vote of no confidence is rejected, the law is approved, goes to the Senate, then goes back to the National Assembly for a second read.

There's a big limitation to 49.3: you can't use it at will. That would be preposterous. Imagine a Prime Minister using 49:3 eleven times in six months. Couldn't happen, right?

Elisabeth Borne, by whom I really mean Emmanuel Macron, decided to do exactly that.

Ordinarily, the Prime Minister (so Borne) is only able to use 49:3 once per year... except for laws related to finances. And oh, would you look at that, Macron had a big project planned for a long time:

la réforme des retraites

The idea is to basically extended how long we need to the national pool for retirement, before we can retire ourselves and benefit from pension. There's been a fair bit of manipulation here: the government announced they would prolong the length by two years, then less than that, then more.. But it doesn't account for people who do hard work like construction workers and the likes. People die before reaching that age. Among other young people, we often joke that we won't get any pension, but it's out of apathy, really. It's a horrible reform, it creates more gender inequality and most of all, it's unneeded. The government's justification is that it's necessary, otherwise the country will be heavily indebted by 2050, but it's obviously a pretext. Dozens of experts have said he's wrong - but Macron loves to listen to people who agree with him. Know what we could do instead?

Currently, there's a guy who's richer than goddamn Elon Musk. His name is Bernard Arnault. He's the richest (officially) guy in the world. He's also French. He could fund everybody's pension for decades.

So. Anyway.

People were opposed to that reform from the very start, even in 2019-2020. Our deputies at the National Assembly filibustered for a while (basically sending thousands of amendments to be studied, most notably the Left union NUPES, while the Far-Right party RN's attempt at filibuster were lukewarm at best). Macron (through his Prime Minister, Edouard Philippe) used 49.3 to bypass the amendments... but then there were a lot of protests, and do you know what else happened at that time?

COVID-19, our beloved!

One positive consequence of the pandemic was that the government was so busy facing it (with no competence whatsoever, aside from lying a lot to the population) that they just gave up on any bill they were trying to pass.

The pandemic didn't stop, but everyone pretended it did, so here we were in 2022, and Macron was once again trying to make everybody accept his goddamn reform. Once again, filibuster happened and then Macron (through his Prime Minister, Borne) started using 49.3 like there's no tomorrow.

From October to December 2022, Borne used 49:3 ten times. Then on January 23th, 2023...

"Look out! New rule!"

The government taught us there were more than 3 numbers...

Bitches, bros and nonbinary hoes: please welcome 47.1!

Pronounced ka.ʁɑ̃t.sɛtœ̃, 47.1 is the bad guy reappearing after you thought he'd been blown up already, but with broken teeth. It basically says to the deputies:

"Hey, if you don't vote for me quickly, I'll be automatically approved :-) Oh, and you can't filibuster your way through this either <3"

The bill would then go to the Senate (with a shortened debate time too), then again at the National Assembly.

"People know 49.3, it's very unpopular because it's brutal. But nobody knows about 47.1, it makes things easier for us," said a clueless Macron deputy.

People complained, because while they were confused at what exactly 47.1 entailed, they knew it was basically 49.3 with makeup.

Which it was.

4) NO CONFIDENCE

So the pension bill was voted at the Senate on March 11th, 2023. On March 15th, a Joint Committee approved it and added some stuff. On March 16th, the Senate approved the changes.

THEN IT WAS TIME... FOR THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY... TO VOTE FOR THE BILL AGAIN.

At this point, the bill was more than unpopular. Polls estimated than more than 70% of the French population was against the pension reform. The left-wing NUPES comprising 32% of the seats was very much against the bill. The far-right RN had also made it clear that they were against it (17%), as they'll do anything to be contrarian to the government - they're populists, after all. Even the right-wing-but-not-Macronist UDC (7%) was not very supportive of the bill - contrarians, proud, and a bit clueless too. But some of them truly believe the bill sucks, which is nice. They're not *all* unreasonable.

So Elisabeth Borne used her favorite secret weapon that we were beginning to miss:

i hope you appreciate my quality montage

Borne 49.3'd her way through the bill, inviting everybody to gang up on her for a vote of no confidence.

The next day, Friday, two motions were submitted:

the first one by LIOT, the center alliance. It was the most likely to be approved, contrary to...

the second one by RN, the right-wing party. It wasn't likely to be approved because the RN is (rightfully) stigmatized.

The votes would take place on the following Monday, after the weekend.

5) MONEY IS MAN'S BEST FRIEND

"Nobody asked you." (Arkunir proceeded to ratio Elon Musk a few more times, as well as Macron himself.)

Do you know how to easily get the approbation of a people who's protesting against a financial reform? Just get a billionaire to support you! I'm sure this will not make anything worse. Macron loves dem billionaires, after all he gave the Légion d'Honneur (an official reward) to Jeff Bezos, you know, the Amazon guy, earlier during his second mandate. Macron also has very shady links to McKinsey...

So anyway, what a weekend. Americans started speaking out, complaining about us lazy French (to them, I'll reply: mobilize for your rights!), in particular Elon Musk, who proceeded to get ratio'd (the Twitter equivalent of getting owned) multiple times by French people.

Meanwhile, Aurore Bergé, controversial chief of Macron's party for her many bad faith arguments at the National Assembly, enjoined the right to own up to what some of them had been saying against the bill for weeks. So she basically unintentionally motivated some right-wing deputies to vote favorably to the motions of no confidence.

"Let's all get behind Aurore Bergé!"

Naturally, a lot of people joked about it. Some of us almost thought she was trying to destroy the party from inside.

Monday arrived, and I couldn't do anything except watch the hours-long stream of the National Assembly, starting at 4pm.

One member of every party gave a speech, basically repeating what they'd been saying. It was boring, endless, and it ended with Adrien Quatennens, and oh my god I haven't even talked about him but who cares, he's irrelevant for this portion of our history, but I still had to mention him as he represented people who don't belong to a specific party. I'll probably explain the deal about him when the time comes to talk about the 2027 presidential elections. This post is already long enough as is.

Then the votes finally happened. There was an agonizing 30 minutes to vote, and at the end of the first one (LIOT's)... It hadn't been approved. Basically all of the left, the far-right and LIOT had voted, and we only needed about 25 members of LR (the right who's not with Macron). We got a few of them, but not enough. The second vote was irrelevant. We had lost.

OR HAD WE?

Protests kept going. Actually, protests got bigger. Without much consultation, protests took place in the evening just after the vote.

In fact, as I'm writing this, the protests haven't stopped.

6) So, are we in a totalitarian state?

Study.com did a helpful explanation of what is a totalitarian state that I'll condense in simple points:

Rule by a single party: Macron certainly likes to think that's the case.

Control of the media: You could make a case for this. Officially, we have freedom of speech. Unofficially, journalists can't contradict the president. The medias love to pretend they're neutral when they're decidedly not (and a lot of big medias are owned by a fascist billionaire).

Control of education: Does defunding public education count? Possibly. The state of education in this country is regrettable, in spite of a lot of professors trying their very best.

Control of the population through propaganda, terror and intimidation: Police brutality is generalized, and Darmanin, Minister of Interior, wrongly declared that it was illegal for unwarned protests to take place. The cops enforce this fake rule by fining people who're there with no reason. There is definitely an attempt to quell the rebellion, not by listening to opponents, but by pushing through.

Control of the economy: 11 uses of an anti-democracy failsafe for the economy certainly looks like it.

The Council of Europe, Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders and Iran (yeah...) called out France for its police brutality. My university has been blocked for a week and a half and has already confirmed that it will be blocked next week as well. There are recordings - actual recordings! - where cops threaten young people, and we know this isn't a rare case at all. Lots of aggression.

A kid just died during his high school final exam because the adults refused to help him.

Marion Game, the French voice of Lois in Malcolm in the Middle or Mallory Archer in Archer, died. She was a beloved actress. I'll miss her.

Not all of this is linked to the rest, but France is having a hard time right now.

7) Remember who the real enemy is

On March 22nd, Macron did an interview at 1pm, obviously speaking to the only part of the population that loves his pension reform: people who're already retired. He repeated what he's been saying for years: "The French people elected me for my program." even though he acknowledged, when he got re-elected, that a consequent (the majority, in fact) part of his voters had only done so to counter the far-right.

Macron also said, "The [Insert offensive term for people who only earn minimal wage] have never had a better purchasing power," which is bold, both because he was even more condescending than usual, and also because EVERYTHING IS HORRIBLY EXPENSIVE.

Around the same time, the French journal Libération said the following:

"When on March 21, Macron said that 'the mob, whichever it is, has no legitimacy compared to the people who affirm its sovereignty through elections', he disowns democracy three times. First off, he disowns any popular aspect of the protests, regardless of what they are, because if the mob has no legitimacy (although it is supported by unanimous unions) over one of the biggest opposition protests of the history of the 5th Republic (even with the support of the vast majority of society, especially among the workforce)... It means a social movement can't be recognized as the voice of the people."

The two other ways, summarized:

Macron's opinion isn't the voice of the people, as he can still act against the nation's interest

opposing "the crowd" and "the electors" disowns social democracy, ie. workers unions, through which the people also speak

I think it's a great formulation of what's going on.

What do you mean, that's not a King Charles?

Things aren't that bad, though. Macron had to ask King Charles III to not come visit France right now. He didn't expect the protests to get worse (for him) after the failed vote of no confidence.

Adèle Haenel, one of the leads in Portrait of a Lady on Fire and real-life lesbian, spoke out in favor of the workers and said feminists had to take part in the fight.

We got our own version of MinetaGate: in an interview given to the main gay magazine in France, Têtu, Olivier Dussopt, the Minister of Labour, said two things:

He came out as gay, which is something that we, the gay community, immediately rejected

He said that the government might need to use 49.3 again

It worked out so well last time...

Anyway...

I'll simply conclude with what the chief of the General Worker's Confederation said in regard to this interview:

"Either [Macron]'s completely unfamiliar with our system and that's very serious, or he's fucking with us."

[nando161mando]

Cops are class traitors

[hydrosspyross]

Macron is making me miss Chirac

And if that isn't the worst thing ever i don't know what is

[the-bibrarian]

From behind a police riot army, the french Constitutional Council upheld the pension reform yesterday and Macron enacted it today (Saturday 15/04/23).

Macron will stop at nothing to silence protesters.

The riot police is seen here beating up protesters on Thursday, including a lawmaker from the leftist opposition party LFI. Video credit: @LouisPisano on twitter.

This isn’t even about pensions anymore, it’s about which kind of society we want to live in and it’s about democracy. So we’ll keep to the streets.

Next major day of action is May 1st.

[nullnvoid911]

French national police during a protest against pension reform in Lille.

police_urgence_photographie, April 6, 2023

[oodlenoodleroodle]

Macron is such a piece of shit. -_- "the youth's are rioting because they play violent videogames" PEOPLE ARE RIOTING BECAUSE A COP SHOT A TEENAGER IN THE HEAD YOU ABSOLUTE GARBAGE SHIT AHDJEJAGAHDJDJE

To the protestors: keep going you're doing great