The 41-year-old centrist told a news conference: “This is an ambitious project and I will not give up on it.” He added the planned pension overhaul “is indispensable” because it is based on the triad of “universality, fairness and responsibility”. France is expected to grind to a halt from December 5 as transport workers and civil servants prepare to stage mass rolling strikes against M Macron’s pension reform, namely his plan to reduce their special retirement privileges. M Macron says the current state-run system is too costly and complicated and wants to merge France’s 42 different pension schemes into a single points-based system.
He argues the new system will be fairer and more sustainable, as it will ensure that all French workers have the same pension rights and help plug a chronic deficit.
But workers for the SNCF national railway and Paris public transport operator RATP are angry because the changes could strip them of their special pension rights, which allow them to retire at 52, a decade earlier than the legal retirement age for a full public pension.
Many other professions have a special pension regime. Aircrews are also allowed to retire early while lawyers and doctors pay less tax.
M Macron, for his part, slammed unions for organising protests against a reform they know very little about.
“The planned protest action strikes me as odd,” he said, adding unions were “playing on people’s fears” and encouraging citizens to denounce “a reform whose exact terms remain unknown”.
The French President said: “It’s not a protest against the pension reform, but a protest against the end of special pension regimes.”
National Assembly chief Richard Ferrand told weekly Le Journal du Dimanche the December strike was “a protest to maintain inequalities that we cannot and do not want to tackle”.
Philippe Martinez, the leader of the hard-left CGT union, rejected M Macron’s claim the strike wasn’t against the pension reform per se, but against the end of special pension regimes.
M Martinez said the reform “will affect everyone” in a joint interview with RTL radio, LCI television and Le Figaro daily, as he accused M Macron of seeking to “divide the French”.
The union chief has repeatedly warned the pension overhaul will force people to work longer and for less.
While the Macron government did not waver in the face of rolling strikes last year over reform of the debt-ridden SNCF, M Macron has since been weakened politically by anti-government “yellow vest” protests at the end of 2018 and early this year.
The yellow vest crisis, which shook France to its core and sparked some of the worst street violence in decades, was triggered by anger over falling living standards but also concerns M Macron was indifferent to citizens’ needs and pushing his agenda too hard.
The pension bill is to be debated by lawmakers next summer. The government has said that the changes would only apply to people born after 1963 and enter progressively into force between 2025 and 2040.
Right-wing former president Nicolas Sarkozy raised France’s retirement age from 60 to 62 in 2010 despite months of protests that brought millions onto the streets.