Under the crystal chandeliers of the Elysée village hall, Emmanuel Macron opens his arms wide. “Ah, the best defender of pensions! », he says to the former Prime Minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, on the sidelines of the Asian Lunar New Year ceremony. This Friday, January 27, the Head of State sees in the 74-year-old Chiraquian living proof that we can, from Matignon, reform pensions while preserving the President of the Republic from the splashes of unpopularity. The Fillon reform, twenty years ago, had it not thrown more than a million people into the street?
The current Prime Minister is absent, busy on her side of the Seine, left bank. The Head of State does not say that Elisabeth Borne is the best pensions ambassador. But “When she says something, she says it with good reason”he will support her on January 30, from the Netherlands.
The next day, the mobilization, more massive than the first demonstrations against the reform project almost two weeks ago, had the effect of a scathing disavowal of Elisabeth Borne. Around 4:30 p.m., from the benches of the National Assembly where she answers questions to the government, the tenant of Matignon worries about it by SMS with her cabinet: “If we finish at 1.2 [million de manifestants] or 1.3 is not a drama? We have a risk of being above? », she asks. The figure falls a few hours later: 1.27 million French people, according to the Ministry of the Interior. Its strategy intended to gently land this burning dossier looks like a quagmire.
The Head of Government received the mission of the Head of State, from June 2022, to “build a path” to pick up “majorities of ideas” in the National Assembly. Elisabeth Borne now fears seeing the majority escape her on this unpopular text. To the point that at Matignon, we find it good to specify that the door of an appeal to 49.3 remains double-locked. Such a path, which would be unprecedented in France to reform pensions, would mark the failure of the Borne method. “It’s no way”warned the Prime Minister, on the eve of the mobilization of the 31st, to deputies of the majority.
LR ups the ante
But the situation is worse than expected with the Les Républicains (LR) party. The former minister of labor demanded to see the president of the movement, Eric Ciotti, and the leader of the LR deputies, Olivier Marleix, urgently on Wednesday morning, to gauge the position of the right. Indispensable to the vote, it raises the stakes on the employment of seniors and on long careers. Matignon’s services are still working to correct the imbalances of the reform to the detriment of women or young people, but they refer future adjustments to parliamentary debate.
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