Pension fury boosts May Day protests in France

France was the setting for yet more protests against President Emmanuel Macron's divisive pension reforms on Monday, with rallies given an extra impetus by the day being May Day, celebrating the labor movement worldwide.

Last month, in the face of huge opposition, the government forced through plans to raise France's retirement age from 62 to 64, a change the president insists has to happen to safeguard future financial stability, but which has already provoked a furious reaction and widespread demonstrations and industrial action, which show no sign of abating.

Union leaders and opposition politicians urged protestors to keep up their efforts and use May Day, which has a long history of being a rallying point for political protest in France, as a platform to redouble their expressions of hostility to the legislation.

"I invite all French men and women... to go out and catch the sun, to tan while pushing their baby strollers in the streets of Paris and the rest of the country," said Francois Ruffin, a member of Parliament for the hard-left France Unbowed party, on Sunday, adding that he wanted to "make sure 2023 goes down in the country's social history".

A joint statement issued on behalf of France's trade and student unions called for a "day of exceptional and popular mobilization against the pension reform and for social justice", while Sophie Binet, the newly-elected leader of the country's second-biggest union, the General Confederation of Labor, reiterated her union's position and called on members and the public to form "a human tidal wave" of protest.

"I think that (on Monday) we will have hundreds of thousands of demonstrators, perhaps a million or half a million," added Laurent Berger, head of the French Democratic Confederation of Labor, explaining that in addition to as many as 100,000 people expected to take part in protests in Paris, there would be hundreds of other rally points across the country, for regional demonstrations.

In April last year, Macron won a second presidential term of office, having championed the pension reforms early in his first term, before the policy was put to one side in the face of the novel coronavirus pandemic.

But just months after his victory, he failed to win an outright majority in the parliamentary elections, the first time a newly-elected president had been dealt such a result by the electorate since 1988, limiting his decision-making capability, and a year on from the presidential election, he is the regular target for popular protests, and is scoring poorly in opinion polls.

In a newspaper interview to mark the first anniversary of his re-election, Macron conceded that he should have been more "involved" in defending the pension reform policy, and vowed to "re-engage in the public debate".

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