Inflexible on the substance of the reform, which notably raises the retirement age from 62 to 64 years, Emmanuel Macron has still not found the keys to extinguish the anger of the street.

The head of state and his ministers have however repeated their wish to iron out the situation, like Elisabeth Borne on Sunday evening.

"There is tension necessarily related to the reform. We have to listen to that," she told AFP. The Prime Minister has set herself two objectives: "to appease the country in the face of these tensions and to accelerate responses to the expectations of the French."

To do this, Ms. Borne will open on Monday a vast sequence of consultations spread over three weeks, with parliamentarians, political parties, representatives of local elected officials and social partners if they wish. This "action plan" will first be detailed at noon to Emmanuel Macron, then, still at the Elysee, to the executives of the majority, including the bosses of parliamentary groups, party leaders and some members of government.

The Prime Minister is also due to meet in the afternoon with the presidents of committees in the Assembly, then will continue Tuesday with the presidents of the Senate Gérard Larcher and the Assembly Yaël Braun-Pivet. At stake: to outline a "legislative programme" of texts by ensuring that they build on them "upstream majorities" and thus avoid recourse to a new 49.3.

Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne (R) and President of the National Assembly Yaël Braun-Pivet at the Horizons party congress on March 25, 2023 in Paris © Alain JOCARD / AFP

A crescendo mobilization?

"Do we need appeasement? Obviously and there is a very simple way to get it, it is to withdraw the text, "said the Insoumise Jean-Luc Mélenchon, also calling for the departure of Ms. Borne.

To the unions, which are demanding the withdrawal or, at least, the suspension of the reform, Mrs Borne proposes to "return to work" on various sites, from arduousness to the employment of seniors, including retraining.

Will this be enough to appease them, while the boss of the CFDT Laurent Berger still castigated this weekend in an interview with the magazine Le Grand continent "the absence of dialogue, the injustice of the measure and the misunderstanding of a social mobilization of these two and a half months"?

Until the morning of the previous day of action last Thursday, the executive was counting on a decline in the protest, like this leading minister: "the most likely scenario is that the Constitutional Council validates the text and the social discontent calms down". The mobilization finally went crescendo, between 1.09 million (Beauvau) and 3.5 million (CGT) participants.

This rebound was also accompanied by violence on the sidelines of the processions, with 457 arrests and 441 police and gendarmes injured, in a general electric climate. The terrain of clashes moved Saturday to Sainte-Soline in the Deux-Sèvres, where a demonstration against the basins left dozens injured on the side of the police as demonstrators, with a member of the procession between life and death Sunday.

Demonstration against the pension reform on March 23, 2023 in Paris © Thomas SAMSON / AFP / Archives

The IGPN seized

The controversy is also swelling around an "excessive use of force", in the words of the Council of Europe. In total, the General Inspectorate of the National Police (IGPN) has been seized of 17 judicial investigations since the first national day of mobilization against the pension reform in January, said Sunday its director.

On Saturday, the parades that brought together a few hundred people in several cities did not give rise to major excesses, and the eyes will be on those of Tuesday, including a Parisian procession that will parade from the Place de la République to Nation.

On the ground in Ile-de-France, RER traffic looks "very disrupted" Tuesday, with one train out of two on lines A and B, according to the RATP. In the metro, transit frequencies will be reduced on most lines, some of which will close earlier than usual. The traffic forecasts at the SNCF will be known on Monday.

In the capital, where garbage collectors have been on strike for more than 20 days, the volume of uncollected waste was down Sunday with 7,828 tons still pending.

Garbage cans overflowing with garbage in a Paris street during the garbage collectors' strike, March 21, 2023 © LUDOVIC MARIN / AFP/Archives

And the Directorate General of Civil Aviation has also asked companies to cancel 20% of their flights to Paris-Orly, Marseille, Toulouse and Bordeaux on Tuesday and Wednesday.

© 2023 AFP