No-confidence motions face the Macron government as it tries to force its unpopular changes into law.
President Macron was re-elected on a platform of raising the retirement age and yet his reforms are deeply unpopular"What this crisis goes to show," veteran political commentator Alain Duhamel said recently, "is that there are two Frances out there. They live in completely separate mental worlds, and find it impossible even to communicate."
The government says pushing back the pension age from 62 to 64 is vital in order to preserve France's much-prized "share-out" system - based on a single fund that workers pay into and pensioners draw out of. Instead, people seem more inclined to believe the arguments of the left and far-right: first that there is no urgency because pension finances are not as bad as they're portrayed - but also that it's unjust.
In a functioning democracy the opposing arguments would surely find some form of compromise. After all, a majority of the population, while rejecting the Macron plan, also agrees that some reform of pensions is needed.Faith in conventional politics and the parliamentary system is in fact at rock-bottom.
One left-wing MP posed outside the Assembly with his foot on a ball painted with the head of the labour minister; fearing mob violence, a leading pro-Macron MP called on Friday for police protection for her colleagues.Thousands of tonnes of rubbish lie uncollected in Paris as refuse collectors strike for a second week
In practice, even the so-called "transpartisan" motion tabled by a centrist group in parliament - supposedly more liable to create a consensus between the mutually hostile far-left and far-right - would be unlikely to get the numbers.
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