The French President, Emmanuel Macron, advocated this Wednesday for the entry into force of his unpopular pension reform "by the end of the year"in full hardening of the protests against this project.
"This reform is necessary. It doesn’t make me happy. I would have preferred not to", assured the Liberal president in an interview with the TF1 and France 2 channels, assuming the "unpopularity" of measure.
The reform is currently in the Constitutional Council, which must resolve the appeals presented by the opposition and the government’s questions, before its eventual entry into force, which Macron wants "by the end of the year".
The head of state reiterated that the delay of the retirement age from 62 to 64 years by 2030 and the advancement to 2027 of the requirement to contribute 43 years, instead of 42, to collect a full pension seeks to avoid a "deficit" in the pension fund.
Since Thursday, when he decided to adopt her by decree, the protests hardened every night in several cities in France, with protesters, mostly young people, burning garbage containers in their clash with security forces.
The president, for whom his only mistake was "not be able to convince" about the need for reform, charged against these protesters, which he described as "seditious"and compared them with those who tried to assault the institutions in the United States in 2021 and in Brazil in 2023.
"We will not tolerate any overflow", he added, when the leftist opposition, lawyers’ unions, magistrates, NGOs such as the Human Rights League or Amnesty International, and even the ombudsman warn of police action.
His statements come the eve of a new day of strike and demonstration called by the unions that on March 7 took between 1.28 and 3.5 million people to the streets, in the most important protests against a social reform in three decades. .