‘Feel betrayed’: Thousands protest Macron’s imposed French pension reform

PARIS — Thousands of people gathered in the French capital on Thursday to protest President Emmanuel Macron’s government pushing through a controversial pension reform without a parliamentary vote.

“Who sows misery reaps wrath,” read a sign at the rally in Paris on the Place de la Concorde opposite Parliament.

Macron is determined to implement the deeply unpopular reform, which includes raising the retirement age from 62 to 64.

It has sparked two months of heated debates in parliament and repeated nationwide strikes and protests.

But Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne used special constitutional powers on Thursday to ram the amendments through the National Assembly of the House of Commons without giving lawmakers a chance to vote.

“I am outraged by what is happening. I feel betrayed as a citizen,” said school teacher Laure Cartelier in the crowd at Place de la Concorde.

“In a democracy, this should have happened through a vote,” said the 55-year-old.

A police source put the number of protesters in Paris at “several thousand”.

– ‘Manu, do you need my hearing aid?’ –

Elsewhere in France, others also rallied to vent their frustration.

In the southeastern city of Grenoble, CGT union representative Karen Mantovani was among several hundred people on the streets.

“I thought they would respect democracy a little bit,” she said.

“But apparently I’m very naive.”

She was disappointed with the low turnout.

Polls in recent weeks have shown that around two-thirds of French people were against the pension reform, but around the same number believed it would pass anyway.

At another protest in the northern city of Lille, one of the protesters wondered how the President had failed to make public Resistance to register against his plan.

“Hey Manu, do you need my hearing aid?” read his poster, using a very informal shortened form of Macron’s first name.

In the southeastern city of Lyon, around 400 people gathered in front of administrative buildings and demanded the resignation of the president.

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