Pension reform: an arm of honor that hides others

Reserved for subscribers

SUNDAY NOTEBOOKS. If pension reform was one of Macron’s main campaign themes, the method applied by the Prime Minister questions.

Par Hervé Gattegno

OYou know Musset’s maxim: “A door must be open or closed.” “Revised by Emmanuel Macron, it results in the door being “at the same time” open and closed. Thus, when the union leaders, unanimously hostile to the pension reform, asked to be received at the Élysée, it was the Prime Minister who answered, inviting them to knock on the minister’s door (Olivier Dussopt) whose, it seems he, “the door is always open”. But the trade unionists only want to talk to the boss. Faced with their insistence, the president made his position known in a letter: he “understands the concerns” raised by the project, but refrains from intervening during “Parliament’s time”.

It is this response that Philippe Martinez described as “arm of honor to…