I see Macron has made what’s being hailed as an undemocratic decision to get the pension age change into law. While the UK press is hardly full of this, it sounds like there’s going to be a lot of protests in a nation that sees protesting as a good thing. Is this going to cause major disruption, or is it just a flash in the pan, over next week?
Fairly major is my view. Listening to Melonchon and Le Pen tonight they are certainly stirring as hard as they can.
And even my softy leftish core finds the use 49.3 a bit hard to handle.
Certainly if I was booking travel I would be taking out cancellation insurance.
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Just imagine if French women born in or close to a particular decade, had been stuffed with having to work 6 more years before they could access their pension, suddenly pretty much without warning. And no tapering so that those who were going to be hit soonest weren’t hit with all of it at once, reserving the full impact for those who would be last effected and have more notice to prepare.
With the fuss about these (tapered) 2 extra years in France, would French women have been turning over cars on the Champs Elyées and setting fire to them if they’d been stuffed with 6 years?
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I think there’ll be lots of posturing and shouting over the coming days, but I can’t see it amounting to anything serious.
Mind you if Marcel Duchamp was still around to remake his Air de Paris in the coming weeks, it might be a different colour to the original and one cerainly wouldn’t want to break the glass! 'https://www.centrepompidou.fr/fr/ressources/oeuvre/cbLy77k
Meanwhile in sleepy La Roque Bouillac life goes on as usual…
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And of course the irony is that that it was a by-product of Equality legislation that very few noticed at the time.
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Yeah no issue with it needing to be made equal for fairness. Just shockingly badly and harmfully implemented.
The taper was in the plan made by Peter Bottomley for the UK, I found out recently, which would have spread the adjustment and its effects more fairly. But apparently Ian Duncan Smith (another kHunt) threw out the taper which landed the full effect on the early ones without any mitigation or chance to prepare.
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The same man who stuffed up our winter fuel payments!
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Bastards, one and all!
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I think the question is whether France sees itself as northern European or southern
Another case for merging two threads?
Of course always happy to pontificate twice rather than once, but less interesting to others?
Well that only took 2 replies on a French political post for it to turn into a Uk one 
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My straw poll says that people think using Art 49.3 was unacceptably autocratic and that - assuming the oppositions can unite on a vote of no confidence - they might bring down the government.
Your thoughts?
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The only opposition on this really is NUPES and the Rassemblement National, as most of their électorat is from the popular vote, working and to some extent what we call middle class, fonctionnaires etc (but I doubt if most of the RN deputies will vote in favour) but if all thier deputies voted against they wouldn’t have the majoritie vote and I doubt very much that the traditional right wing and most of the traditional left variants écolo, greens will probably vote for the government in place.
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I’m reminded of why I blocked the politics topic - I don’t want to be rude about it, but one might hope that the UK could be left out of some discussions, at least to begin with.
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I listened to a green interview earlier who was tying himself in knots to hang onto the fence - so not 100% that they would.
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The problem with that is you are likely to miss some very interesting drift. 
I have never blocked a thread, just ignored those I am fed up with. 
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It seems a small price to pay, though TBH the drift in political threads is almost never interesting and they often become deeply unpleasant.
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One would hope that discussions on French politics would not suffer that fate, but seems not.
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I was reading this morning that 49.3 has been invoked 100 times since the present form of government was set up in the 1950s, and Elisabeth Borne has previously used it, but for less controversial issues.
Yes they have been sneaky. It is not supposed to be used more than X times in a parliament, but she has argued that they have only for necessary financial matters which don’t count!
She has used it 10 times so far. The record for a single government is 13.
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