In a meeting at the Japy gymnasium in Paris on Tuesday night, the “united left” of Nupes called “to shake the walls of the Elysée on Thursday”, a day of union mobilization against the government’s pension reform project.
In the middle of the flags of their Nupes alliance, the communist, rebel, socialist and environmentalist deputies walked together with a smile on their lips through the central aisle, to a great clamor from the militants present in this historic place of left-wing demonstrations. .
“It’s nice, it’s something you don’t see so often,” says Nicolás G., a communist activist, who stresses that this first official meeting of the Nupes against the pension reform is “a necessity because it is an emergency” before “destructive reform”.
“The left of all colors has to unite to show their faces, with the unions,” adds this 64-year-old teacher, who says that he has to “do two more years to have all (his) rooms” for retirement.
“Do not be fooled”
Two days after a first day of mobilization called by all the unions, the slogan was mobilization and “not to be fooled” by the government’s speeches.
Saluting the union unity around this fight, the head of the PCF Fabien Roussel stressed that “this unity also obliges us”. “It is next Thursday that the walls of the Élysée must shake”, he affirmed, “it is next Thursday that we must be the force and the number”.
“If you are so numerous this afternoon, it is because you have not understood that this reform is for our good,” joked the leader of the LFI deputies, Mathilde Panot, while the Government has started a pedagogy process to explain its reform.
“Don’t believe them! From this gym we tell the government not to fool anyone,” and that “it is a political option to make millions of people suffer by making them work longer,” he said.
Changing the lives of the French
Monique Brun, an 80-year-old communist activist, who came as a neighbor, is delighted “that we are together”, although she breathes between laughs that she would have “preferred to see Mélenchon” whom she finds “brilliant”.
“This political diversity helps raise awareness and we really need it,” he adds, going as far as “listening to the arguments.”
On stage, the first secretary of the PS Olivier Faure is enthusiastic: “The left is beautiful when it comes together to change the lives of the French.” In the front row, his rival Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol, who will try to steal the head of the party from him on Thursday in a vote by militants and who has expressed reservations about the Nupes, is sitting not far from rebel deputy Alexis Corbière. .
“They could have returned to the ISF, abolished the single tax or imposed super-profits like we ‘Bolsheviks’ had asked for,” joked the socialist leader.
“Doing the Zad in the Assembly”
“We will not release it, we will do the Zad not only in the Assembly, but in all of France,” insisted the head of the environmentalists Marine Tondelier, after similar comments last week irritated the government and the macronie.
“We assume that this word ZAD (zone to defend) is the symbol of the battles won in the past,” he insisted.
Among the political interventions, testimonies from employees, unionists, feminists, punctuated the meeting.
Among cheers, a person in charge of the CGT of the RATP assured that Thursday “will not go well”, evoking a movement “that promises to be powerful”. He called for “enlargement, everyone has a place in this fight.”
“This reform, the world of work cannot accept it,” said Mouloud, a worker in the logistics sector, calling for “weeks and weeks of mobilization.”
Source: BFM TV
