Dhe French Senate finally voted 195 to 112 in favor of President Emmanuel Macron’s pension reform on Saturday evening. “After hundreds of hours of debate, the Senate approved the pension reform plan. This is a crucial stage in completing a reform that will secure the future of our pensions,” wrote French Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne on Twitter. She wants to do her utmost to ensure that the reform is finally passed in the coming days, Borne added.
The majority of senators had already voted in favor of a corresponding article on reform in the draft law on Thursday night, and the entire proposal for pension reform has now been accepted.
The draft is now expected to be examined next Wednesday by a joint committee made up of members of the Lower and Upper Houses. If the committee agrees, the final vote in both chambers will probably take place on Thursday. At the moment, however, the outcome of this vote in the lower chamber, the National Assembly, still seems uncertain. Macron’s party needs the votes of its allies for a majority.
With the approval of the Senate, however, President Emmanuel Macron has come a step closer to realizing his controversial pension reform. It envisages gradually raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 years.
Ongoing mass protests
In France, hundreds of thousands of people across the country protested against government reforms on Saturday. The Interior Ministry put the number of demonstrators at 368,000. Unions, on the other hand, had expected up to a million people.
As with previous protests, there were no major clashes with the police on Saturday. The unions called for further demonstrations and strikes on Wednesday. In a joint statement, they called on the government to conduct a citizen survey.
