‘Do you think I enjoy doing this reform?’: France’s Macron breaks silence after overriding parliament

12 comments
  1. KEY POINTS

    >French President Emmanuel Macron broke his silence following widespread protests and strikes over his government’s forcing of pension changes through parliament without a vote.

    >“Do you think I enjoy doing this reform? No,” he said in a televised interview with TF1 and France 2, but said the pension system was broken and “the longer we wait the worse the situation will get.”

    >Macron acknowledged people felt there was “injustice” in being asked to work longer while companies made record profits and he would look to ensure they contribute more.

  2. Look at pension ages in other countries and compare to France.. look at the ageing population in EU countries. These protesters now are basically saying to young generations that they need to pay more and are not allowed a pension themselves because the current generation wants to have it all.

  3. Whether the reform was necessary or not, I think we can all agree that the way he pushed it through was the absolute dumbest thing he could have done from a political perspective.

  4. Kudos to him for moving forward with this reform. It’s needed despite it being unpopular. He is willing to commit political suicide with this, which is impressive. To play the devil’s advocate though, there would be no way he lasted more than his second term so he is now going all in.

  5. I know people will always hate this sort of policies (because of course nobudy likes when their life is made worse or harder), but if you would step back and look at it from state’s perspective it would become obvious why its done. French population (just like almost all Western Europe) is aging and there will be a whole lot more old people than young people soon, somehow pension system needs to account for that.

    There is no magical solution that will fix everything and everyone will be happy and satisfied

  6. He broke something in our people. We don’t have respect anymore for a republic that work against us and tonight might be historic.

Leave a Reply