France's Constitutional Council on Friday, April 14, approved the key elements of President Emmanuel Macron's controversial pension reform, while rejecting certain parts of the legislation.
The banner reform in the legislation to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64 was validated by the Constitutional Council after almost three months of protests opposing the measure. Macron can enact the bill within 15 days.
The court struck out six measures not seen as fundamental to the essence of the reform and threw out a request filed by the left for a referendum on an alternative pension law that would keep the retirement age at 62. The council will rule on a similar request next month.
The decision dismayed and enraged critics of the pension plan, including protesters gathered outside Paris City Hall on Friday evening as the decision came down. Most chanted peacefully, while some set a garbage bin on fire.
Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne said the decision "marks the end of the institutional and democratic path of this reform," adding that there was "no victor" in what has turned into a nationwide standoff and France's worst social unrest in years.
French hard-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon vowed that the fight against Macron's pension reform would continue despite a top court's approval of the main changes.
'I fear an outpouring of anger'
"The fight continues and must gather force," the leader of La France Insoumise (LFI) party said on Twitter. Communist Party leader Fabien Roussel said signing the law "would not be pouring oil on the fire, but a jerrycan full of petrol."
"I fear an outpouring of anger," he told the BFM channel. Far-right Rassemblement National (RN) figurehead Marine Le Pen added that the fate of the reform was "not sealed" despite the decision.
In a last-ditch effort, French trade unions urged Macron not to sign his reform into law.
"Given the massive [public] rejection of this reform, the unions request him solemnly to not promulgate this law, the only way to calm the anger which is being expressed in the country," reads a joint statement sent to Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Labor unions and opposition lawmakers were hoping for a decision to strike down the changes that Macron championed during his first period in office and put at the heart of his second term, which began last May.
Having repeatedly dismissed calls for talks with union leaders in recent weeks, Macron invited unions for talks on Tuesday "whatever the decision of the court," said a presidential official, asking not to be named. “The doors of the Elysée [presidential palace] will remain open, without condition, for this dialogue," Macron's office said.
Inspecting the tortuous restoration efforts four years after the fire at the Notre-Dame cathedral, Macron indicated he had no intention to yield in any area. "Stay the course, that's my motto," he said.
Some 380,000 people took to the streets nationwide on Thursday in the latest day of union-led action against the bill since January, according to the interior ministry. But that was far fewer that the nearly 1.3 million who demonstrated at the height of the protests in March.