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Rubbish piles up in strike-bound Paris

Thousands of tonnes of garbage have piled up on streets across the French capital after a week of strike action by dustbin collectors against government pension reforms, city hall said Sunday.

Published: 12 March 2023 18:31 CET
Rubbish collectors of the Paris municipality cleaning service
Rubbish collectors of the Paris municipality cleaning service "Proprete de Paris" gather in front of Ivry incinerator factory, in Ivry on March 6, 2023, ahead of the massive strikes from March 7 against the French government's proposed pension reform, with unions promising to bring the country "to a standstill". Photo: Thomas SAMSON / AFP

Three incineration plants outside the capital have been hit by the work stoppages that have left entire pavements covered in black bags and overflowing bins.

The capital’s household waste agency Syctom said it has been re-routing dustbin lorries to other storage and treatment sites in the region and has yet to resort to calling in the police.

City hall employees have for the last week been picking up rubbish in just half of Paris’s districts. The strike has hit some of the most exclusive areas including the 5th, 6th and 16th arrondissements.

Other districts are served by private firms which have not gone on strike.

According to the hard-left CGT union, refuse collectors and drivers can currently retire from 57 years of age, but would face another two years of work under the reform plans which still grant early retirement for those who faced tough working conditions.

Life expectancy for the garbage workers is 12-17 years below the average for the country as a whole, the CGT says.
 
Out on the streets, 18-year-old student Christophe Mouterde told AFP the dustbin collectors were among “the first victims of this reform… often they have started work young… in a job that’s more difficult than for other people in offices”.
 
Pastry chef Romain Gaia, who works in the 2nd district where bins are not being collected, said, “It’s terrible, there’s rats and mice.”
 
 
But he still offered support for the garbage workers despite the smelly mountains of rubbish nearby.
 
“They are quite right to strike,” said the 36-year-old. “Normally they have no power, but if they stop work they really have (power).”
 
The reform’s headline measure and the cornerstone policy of President Emmanuel Macron’s second term in office is a hike in the general minimum retirement age to 64 from 62, seen by many as unfair to people who start working early.
 
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JOHN LICHFIELD

OPINION: A European disaster for Macron could lead to messy autumn elections in France

The approaching European elections are predicted to be a disaster for the Macronists - but will this actually have any effect on France? John Lichfield predicts that it will, possibly even bringing fresh - and very messy - domestic elections in the autumn.

Published: 25 April 2024 10:10 CEST
OPINION: A European disaster for Macron could lead to messy autumn elections in France

There is a paradox at the heart of Macronism. The President was elected in 2017 as a young, white-collar revolutionary who would detonate France’s repressed energy by scrapping the stifling, consensus politics of centre-left and centre-right.

And yet the profile of his voters has become progressively older. His most loyal supporters are the status-quo loving over-60s – or rather they have been until now.

One of the most striking aspects of the disastrous opinion poll results for the President’s centrist alliance before the June 9th European elections is the desertion of part of Macron’s grey army.

At the 2022 Presidential election, 39 percent of over-65s voted for Macron in the first round, compared to 28 percent in the wider electorate.

Without the oldies, Macron might have come second to Marine Le Pen in the first round two years ago. The second-round run-off, which was won 58.5-41.5 percent by Macron, would have been a very close-run thing.

In the polling before the European elections, the lead candidate for Macron’s Renew alliance, Valérie Heyer, is running neck and neck in the “grey” vote with Jordan Bardella, the lead candidate of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National.

They are on 25 percent each among the over-65s in an Ipsos poll for La Tribune.

READ ALSO Can foreign residents in France vote in European elections?

Older voters are prized by political parties because they are reliable voters. No longer, it seems. Something like half the over-65s who voted for Macron in 2022 say they won’t bother to leave home on Sunday June 9th.

The shifts in the old vote largely explains why Le Pen’s camp is leading Macron’s camp overall by 14 to 15 points – roughly 32 percent to 17 percent – a score which will have seismic consequences for French politics if confirmed in 45 days’ time.

Why are the oldies so angry with the government? Here lies another paradox.

Macron, the youngest ever President of the Fifth Republic, with the youngest ever Prime Minister, has been kind to oldies (including myself). Rather than a “President of the Getting-on-well”, he has been a “President of the Getting-on-a-Bit”.

His unpopular (but necessary) pension reform was intended, in part, to protect the comfortable pensions of those already retired.

The two Covid lockdowns (probably necessary) protected the old at the expense of the liberty of the young.

The President recently shot down the idea of a one-year freeze on pensions which would have filled the €15 billion hole in the French state budget this year.

Why then so many grumpy old men and women?

One minister blames the constant drum-beat of alarm and despondency in the 24-hour TV news channels. “Retired people are sitting in front of their televisions all day and watching images of a country they no longer recognise,” he says.

Maybe. It is natural that older people are anxious about security and inflation. They also disapprove of the fact that Macron has let the country’s finances spin out of control (but forget that they benefited from the government’s open cheque book during the Covid crisis and the energy inflation caused by the Ukraine war.)

Another striking feature of the opinion polls has been the resurrection of the centre-left, which appeared to be extinct after the Socialist candidate, Anne Hidalgo, scored only 1.75 percent in the first round of the presidential election two years ago. The Socialist champion in the European elections, Raphael Glucksmann, is running at around 12 percent and vaguely threatening to push Macron’s camp into third place.

Is this the beginning of the end of the pro-European New Centre created by Macron in 2017? Is France, which invented the terms Left and Right, lurching back towards binary Left-Right politics?

I doubt it. Glucksmann will not be a candidate in 2027; no convincing moderate politician is yet emerging to challenge the death grip on the Left of the radical, anti-European Jean-Luc Mélenchon. This is a space worth watching, all the same.

In the remaining six weeks of the European campaign, Macron’s strategy will be two-fold. He will finally get involved. He will try to remind voters that European elections are about Europe.

Starting with a big speech on the future of the EU at the Sorbonne university on Thursday, he will seek to persuade the French electorate that Le Pen is a leap into muddle and darkness and that a stronger EU is their best protection in a scary world.

Above all, Macron will try in the weeks ahead to persuade the pro-European over-65s to continue the habit of a lifetime and turn out on June 9th. He may have limited success. Le Pen’s party performs better in polls than in elections. The most recent polls shows a slight narrowing of Bardella’s lead.

But 14 points is a big gap to close in six weeks. Whatever Macron may say in his speech, most French voters, young or old, do not see this as a European election. They see it as a free-hit: a chance to bash Macron after seven years without running the risk of electing a Far Right government.

They may be wrong about that.

A Macron “defeat” by ten points or more on June 9th will increase the chances of a successful censure motion against the government in the National Assembly this summer. Macron will refuse to call an election just before the Paris Olympics. He will prolong the crisis until September when the Gabriel Attal government might fall.

We could be heading for a messy, parliamentary election in France this Autumn – at the same time as a potentially cataclysmic election in the United States and a very predictable election in the UK.

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