For the fifth time in France, unions protested Thursday with a general strike and marches against the government’s planned pension reform, but the mass of protests has decreased compared to previous protests because of the school vacations.
The goal of the protest organizers is to constantly pressure National Assembly deputies to reject the government’s proposal to raise the retirement age from the current 62 to 64. The debate in the National Assembly will continue until Friday midnight. The bill will go to the Senate next week.
Unions have said that if the government does not back down on pension reform despite the protests, an open-ended strike will be called on March 7, which will paralyze the entire country.
Since educational institutions are now closed because of the school vacations, and a large proportion of French families are vacationing away from their homes, participation in street demonstrations and strikes is lower than in previous protests.
14% of railroad workers did not go to work on Thursday, compared to 25% last Tuesday. 75% of trains were running on Thursday. There were no disruptions of public transport in Paris. At the same time, 30% of flights at Paris Orly airport were cancelled in advance.
The state-run energy company EDF said that by Thursday the country’s power generation had been reduced at three nuclear reactors, but that consumers were not affected in any way and there were no power outages anywhere.
The protest petition, announced by the unions, was signed by about a million people on the Internet by Wednesday. About the same number, authorities said, had participated in previous days of protest in marches in more than two hundred cities. On Saturday, according to the Interior Ministry, 963,000 people took to the streets, and trade unions counted 2.5 million protesters. Police expected 450,000 to 650,000 protesters across the country on Thursday.
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