Twe are united! The determination with which the unions and the left are fighting to try to defeat the pension reform cannot be explained solely by their desire to inflict a setback on the President of the Republic, whose ideological orientation they dispute. Nor is it solely due to the fear of being overwhelmed by uncontrolled anger, as was the case during the “yellow vests” movement.
If, for the first time in twelve years, the unions are playing grouped in the battle, with the support of left-wing parties united against the retirement project at 64, it is because another adversary has become encysted in the landscape. Politics. Marine Le Pen is in everyone’s mind. The risk that the founder of the National Rally (RN) could rock the country in four years, after three consecutive failures in the presidential election, has gone from low to serious. The election, in June 2022, of 89 RN deputies was a warning shot that was all the more brutal as no one had anticipated it.
Blocking the RN is no longer experienced as a moral fight but as the obligation to regain points in the lost popular electorate, part of which today serves as a propulsion force for Marine Le Pen. In the first round of the presidential election, the candidate obtained 36% of the votes cast among workers and as many among employees, according to the Ipsos-Sopra Steria survey, carried out from April 6 to 9, 2022, among 4,000 people registered on the electoral rolls. In the whole of the workforce, she was ahead of Emmanuel Macron by 4 points. (28% versus 25%).
Lost electorate
On the left, the first public mobilization meeting against the pension reform was organized on Tuesday, January 10, at the initiative of François Ruffin. This owes nothing to chance. The deputy of La France insoumise (LFI) from the Somme is the man who threw a stone into the pond the day after the spring election sequence, by daring to put into perspective the performance accomplished by Jean-Luc Mélenchon: after having obtained nearly 22% of the vote in the presidential election but failed to qualify for the second round, the leader of the “rebellious” managed to regroup under the banner of the New Popular Ecological and Social Union (Nupes) left-wing forces hitherto scattered for the legislative fight. Result: 149 elected but no majority. For there to be success, it would still have been necessary for the left not to suffer the setback inflicted on it by the RN in the towns and countryside, noted in polite terms the “rebellious”.
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