French President Emmanuel Macron is safe but the situation in Paris is extremely tense.
It did not collect the 287 votes needed to bring down the French government's "transpartisan" no-confidence motion by the independent LIOT party, voted by all the oppositions to Elisabeth Borne's executive after the hated pension reform which raises the minimum age for 62 to 64 years old.
9 votes were missing, with no confidence voted by 278 MPs. "What could not be achieved with a normal parliamentary vote, we must achieve with protests, strikes, demonstrations," the leader of La France Insoumise, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, told BFM TV on the left. radical. "Now is the time to move on to popular distrust."
Outside the Parliament, the first clashes near the Assemblée Nationale with objects thrown by the demonstrators against the police who had ordered the unauthorized dispersal of the demonstration. In response, several charges and tear gas. At Place Vauban some dumpsters have already been set on fire . The police have been deployed since this morning between Concorde and Champs-Elysées, still forbidden for gatherings, and the Invalides area.
In the next few hours, the country risks being blocked, the refineries will close, transport, sanitation, healthcare, all sectors are ready to do battle "until the reform is withdrawn", as repeated by Mélenchon and all the trade unionists, more united than never.
But even in Parliament it risks not ending here: nine votes may not be enough to guarantee the government of Elisabeth Borne , who could be sacrificed in the next few hours to allow for a change of leadership. In the evening, the prime minister announced - going to the Elysée for a meeting with the president - that she wanted to "continue" on her journey and reiterated that "pension reform is essential for the country".
The left has already presented an appeal to the Constitutional Council for possible problems of legitimacy of the reform law and proposes to undertake the difficult path of the so-called "shared initiative referendum", a form of consultation launched in 2015 which provides for the initiative of a fifth of parliamentarians and a tenth of voters (which in the case of France would be around 4.5 million signatures, a goal that cannot be taken for granted).
(Unioneonline/D)