France: Senate votes for Macron’s pension reform – Politics

The French Senate finally voted in favor of President’s pension reform by a margin of 195 to 112 on Saturday evening Emmanuel Macron tuned. “After hundreds of hours of debate, the Senate has approved the pension reform plan. This is a crucial stage in completing a reform that will secure the future of our pensions,” wrote French Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne on Twitter. She wants to do her utmost to ensure that the reform is finally passed in the coming days, Borne added.

The majority of the senators had already voted on Thursday night for a corresponding article on the reform in the draft law, and now the complete proposal has become a pension reform assumed.

The draft is now expected to be examined next Wednesday by a joint committee made up of members of the Lower and Upper Houses. If the committee agrees, the final vote in both chambers will probably take place on Thursday.

At the moment, however, the outcome of this vote in the lower chamber, the National Assembly, still seems uncertain. Macron’s party needs the votes of its allies for a majority. With the approval of the Senate, however, President Emmanuel Macron has come a step closer to realizing his controversial pension reform. It envisages gradually raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 years.

In France, hundreds of thousands of people across the country protested against government reforms on Saturday. The Interior Ministry put the number of demonstrators at 368,000. Unions, on the other hand, had expected up to a million people. Pictures from Paris show street barricades made of garbage cans and wooden pallets on fire. As with previous protests, there were no major clashes with the police on Saturday.

The unions called for further demonstrations and strikes on Wednesday. In a joint statement, they called on the government to conduct a citizen survey.