“It is a regrettable spectacle that has nothing to do with the dignity of the street movement,” lamented this Sunday Laurent Berger, guest of the RTL-Le Figaro-LCI grand jury. The latter even compared the scenes that have taken place in recent days with the “set of Cyril Hanouna.”
In the Assembly, the first week of examination of the text of the pension reform, already stormy, ended in the tumult of a controversy that resulted in the exclusion for 15 days of the LFI deputy Thomas Portes, sanctioned for having raised, in a tweet, the foot on a ball with the effigy of the Minister of Labor Olivier Dussopt.
The unions demand that article 7, which refers to the measure of the retirement age, be the subject of debate and vote. But nothing is less certain, while the deputies of the Nupes have presented thousands of amendments. “Clogging is not a good solution,” commented Mr. Berger. “It sucks,” he added.
A battle for protester count
Laurent Berger also questioned the official count of anti-reform protesters on Saturday. According to the Ministry of the Interior, the demonstrations gathered 963,000 people in France, including 93,000 in Paris. For its part, the CGT has identified 500,000 people in the Parisian procession, and “more than 2.5 million” nationwide. “The figure for Interior is reduced because there were more than a million people on the street,” said Laurent Berger.
“We have our own count: 1.8 million people, we have people who count (the protesters) at each meeting place,” he said. “We can play with the numbers but it’s a big mobilization: there have never been so many people in a mobilization on Saturday,” he continued.
The inter-union calls for a fifth act on February 16 and raises the specter of a “paralyzed France” on March 7, after school holidays. “It can be like in Spain, where the merchants symbolically lower the curtain for an hour or two,” said Laurent Berger.
Source: BFM TV
