“We were willing to join, explain, convince. But is very difficult. We are rowing against the current.” On the eve of the second day of the strike against the pension reform, this renaissance deputy fights to defend the lowering of the retirement age to 64 in his constituency. The macronie struggles to prevail on the ground while the mistrust against the bill has not stopped increasing in recent days.
“People in the markets tell you ‘we pay more for everything, life is getting harder and you’re asking us to work two more years?’ Nothing happens”, laments a macronista parliamentarian to BFMTV.com
“People don’t want 64-year-olds”
“We can talk about the pension deficit and that we want to save solidarity between generations but people do not want 64 years,” continues this elected.
Both party and group, however, have gone to great lengths to give marbles to their elected representatives, from leaflets advocating for reform to training courses for parliamentarians to master the details of raising the retirement age.
With one objective: to convince that the reform is “fair” and “indispensable” as Élisabeth Borne and Olivier Dussopt have been hammering for days. Not always convincing.
The reform, “not always easy to explain”
“We do the work with the activists. But the reform is very technical, it is not always easy to explain or master”, acknowledges Senator Xavier Iacovelli, who is, however, one of the faces of the majority that regularly comes to the fore in the media. .
In an attempt to rally the majority of the French, the course has been set in recent days in public meetings with a deputy, voters and sometimes a “front page headline” minister to appeal. No miraculous results so far. 72% of the French oppose the reform, a result that has increased considerably in recent days according to a poll by Elabe for BFMTV.
Without an official count of the number of public meetings or deals in the markets, a heavyweight of the group advances that “there have been no more than fifty meetings in recent weeks.”
“At the moment, the results are not crazy. Some find themselves at 4 in a small room with a parliamentary collaborator, his wife and his mother. It doesn’t motivate much,” sums up a macronista deputy hostile to the reform.
“I don’t want to take it all in my head anymore”
Caught between questions about purchasing power and merchants struggling to cope with skyrocketing electricity prices, several elected officials point to the reform’s highly flammable context and hard convincing.
“The price of bills, food, the hospital that creaks and now the pensions… People are piling everything up and we are very angry. It’s hard. At one point we no longer wanted to take everything on his head,” admits a parliamentarian from the Renaissance.
Another reason to adopt the minimum service: to doubt the very content of the reform like fifteen renaissance deputies who could not vote on the text. Among them are in particular Barbara Pompili, former minister of Emmanuel Macron and various former socialists.
“When on n’y croit pas soi-même, on a du mal à donner send aux autres. Je connais des collègues qui vont voter le texte mais qui ne tiennent pas vraiment à le défendre auprès de leurs électeurs”, résumé l’un from between them.
“Relieve the Pressure”
Among the supporters of the reform, one however urges his neighbors on the bench to get their shirts wet. It must be said that there is urgency when several nonsense have added fuel to the fire in recent days, such as the words of Minister Franck Riester who admitted that women would be “a little penalized” by the reform.
“Without necessarily transforming the people into unconditional support, public meetings can reduce the pressure,” defends Deputy Robin Reda, who was the first to benefit from the presence of Gabriel Attal during an evening in the constituency.
Meanwhile, the unions expect an “even stronger” mobilization on January 31 than ten days earlier. January 19 had been one of the most followed strike days in the last 30 years.
Source: BFM TV
