FRANCE was in flames on Saturday as hundreds of thousands of workers and youth took to the streets in mass demonstrations across the country against President Emmanuel Macron’s plan to push the minimum retirement age up from 62 to 64.
This was the fourth in a series of mass protests that have rocked France and the Macron presidency.
The three previous days were one-day national strikes called by all the main French trade unions on weekdays, but for Saturday’s protest the unions did not call for a nationwide strike.
This did not prevent air traffic controllers at Paris’ second largest airport, Orly, staging a surprise walkout forcing half the flights to be cancelled.
The CGT union said that 500,000 people were on the streets of Paris alone, an increase on the 400,000 it counted on the last day of protest on February 7th.
Nearly one million were demonstrating in cities throughout the country.
As usual, the interior ministry attempted to play down the impact of the demonstrations, claiming it had only counted 93,000 in Paris and 963,000 nationwide. The sharp increase has been attributed to the increased anger of workers and the large number of students and young people who came out in support of the workers’ demand for Macron to scrap the retirement age bill currently going through the French parliament.
18-year-old student Elisa Haddad told reporters: ‘We often hear that we should be too young to care, but with rising inflation, soaring electricity prices, this reform will impact on our families,’ adding: ‘It is my first demonstration because I couldn’t attend with uni. It is important that the voice of parents and students is heard.’
In Paris, demonstrators were attacked by baton-wielding riot police while water cannons were used against them in the western city of Rennes.
A joint statement from the eight unions spearheading the protests said they would call for a national strike that would ‘bring France to a standstill’ on March 7th if the Macron government ‘remains deaf to the popular mobilisation’.
The leader of the large CGT union, Phillippe Martinez, said: ‘The ball is in the court of the president and the government to determine if the movement intensifies and hardens or if they take into account the current mobilisation.’
In an escalation of this action, unions representing workers on the Paris public transport system are calling for a continuing ‘rolling strike’ from March 7th.
Macron responded to this uprising by workers and youth when he spoke from Brussels last week urging the unions to show a ‘spirit of responsibility’ and ‘not block the life of the rest of the country’.
Macron was in Brussels at a meeting of the EU leaders where they pledged unlimited resources to Ukraine for the prosecution of the war on Russia.
Macron will not be shifted from his determination to drive up the retirement age, on the grounds that French capitalism can no longer afford the cost.
His is exactly the same point-blank refusal that the Tory government in Britain is adopting to demands for pay increases from public sector workers.
The truth is that capitalism is in a desperate crisis and can afford no compromise when it comes to making the working class pay for its crisis.
In France, workers and youth must make March 7th the start of a general strike to bring down Macron.
In Britain, the working class is also taking mass strike action, refusing to be driven into the gutter of poverty and seeing its hard-won rights destroyed by the Tories in order to prop up a bankrupt capitalist system.
The immediate task facing workers and youth in France, Britain and across Europe is to demand the trade union leaders call indefinite general strikes to bring down their governments and go forward to workers’ governments.
Workers’ governments will expropriate the bosses and bankers and go forward to establishing a Socialist United States of Europe.
Now is the time to build sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country to lead the socialist revolution to victory.
