French people rally after top court approves controversial pension age hike
Ramin Mazaheri
Press TV, Paris
Violent protests followed by police repression have erupted across France after the Constitutional Council approved the controversial bill of raising the retirement age by two years.
The austerity measure was opposed by over 70 percent of the country, avoided a Parliamentary vote thanks to an executive decree, and provoked a dozen million-person marches in the last three months.
In a second major disappointment for many, the Council also rejected the possibility of putting the age increase up for a national referendum, which would have been a democratic first in modern France.
Despite being full of career politicians, the 9-person Council was surprisingly pressed into becoming the political referee of French democracy’s latest crisis. No Constitutional Council decision has ever generated such interest.
Unions have vowed to continue the national strikes, but many workers say they can’t keep sacrificing a day’s wages to a political system that seems to operate without popular democratic consent. The legal battle to stop the austerity measure is now definitively over, but no one knows what will come next.
A judicial branch, which won’t stand up for the oversight role of the legislative branch or for the popular will, seems to imply that there’s no check on a chief executive who doesn’t have to worry about re-election. Macron has gotten his age hike, but perhaps at the price of cementing his reputation as a “liberal strongman” in a “rubber bullet democracy”.
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