As France recovers from weeks of sometimes violent protests against reforms to the country's pensions system, the mood of exasperation with the government remains, writes, David Tresilian in Paris Rumbling on since early September, when the government of French President Nicolas Sarkozy introduced legislation intended to reform the country's pensions system, the widespread strikes that have threatened to bring France to a halt over the past two months ended last week when the Senate, the upper house of the French parliament, voted in favour of the legislation. As writers in the French press noted at the time, this was a case of the members of the country's most luxurious retirement home -- the average age of French senators is 64 and the vast majority of them are male and white -- voting to end pension advantages that the rest of the population has enjoyed since the early 1980s. Under the new legislation, the legal retirement age in France has been raised from 60 to 62 years, and with it the number of years that need to be worked in order to have the right to a full pension. Previously available at 65 years, this has now been pushed back to 67, to the dismay of the country's labour unions. From early September onwards, a series of strikes, mostly involving public-sector workers in the transport and education sectors, threatened to bring the country to a halt, with national demonstrations on 7 and 23 September and 2, 12, 16, 19 and 28 October bringing millions of workers onto the streets of French cities in protest at the reforms, severely disrupting the country's transport system and threatening other industries. Some three million people joined the demonstrations across France on 16 October, 825,000 according to the French Ministry of the Interior, with similar numbers turning out in cities across the country on 19 and 28 October, the unions each time talking up the figures and the authorities talking them down. The strikes hit the country's rail transport system particularly hard, with strikes throughout October reducing trains by between two thirds and one half of their usual number. Road transport and oil refinery workers also went on strike throughout October, picketing refineries and fuel depots and threatening a petrol famine throughout the country that saw half the country's service stations close for want of petrol and the rest besieged by frustrated drivers. The strikes were joined in mid-October by students from France's schools and universities, with some institutions blockaded by students and young people elsewhere joining the demonstrations. While these were mostly orderly, some 72 members of the country's security forces were reported to have been injured in rioting between 12 and 26 October, some of it violent, with an estimated 2,500 people arrested. Throughout the period of the demonstrations, opinion polls showed that the majority of the French public supported the strikes, with support hovering at around 70 per cent of those surveyed. However, results were more ambiguous concerning the content of the reforms themselves, with only some 57 per cent of those surveyed telling pollsters that they were against the increase in the retirement age and the other changes to the pensions system. President Sarkozy's own approval ratings, already low, descended further during this latest period of contestation, with October polls showing that only 30 per cent of those surveyed had a good opinion of him, believed to be a record for a French president in recent decades. Following a career spent as a minister in various right-wing governments, Sarkozy was elected president of France in 2007 with 53 per cent of the vote. The next presidential elections take place in 2012, and Sarkozy is nearing the end of his present mandate. Comment in the French press regarding the pensions reforms and the demonstrations against them has been mixed, with many writers underlining the necessity of reforming France's pensions system, already believed to be running significant deficits and expected to become less and less sustainable, while at the same time expressing support for the strikers. Like some other European countries, the French pensions system is based on a system of redistribution, under which the contributions of those in employment are used to pay the pensions of the retired. This system, dating back to the establishment of the French social security system in 1945, is expected to become less and less sustainable because of the retirement of the so-called "baby-boomers", those born in the late 1940s and 1950s, and generally increasing life spans. While the French government estimates that there were 182 contributors for 100 retirees in 2006, this figure was 170 for 100 in 2010, and it is expected to be 150 for 100 in 2030, making the system more and more expensive for those contributing to it. Increasing the number of people paying into the system would be one way of restoring equilibrium, but this is unlikely given France's poor rates of economic growth and high unemployment. Increasing the amount of contributions paid by those in work would also make more money available to pay pensions, though this would increase the already high social security contributions paid by French workers and increase already high labour costs. Sarkozy's government has argued that the only way to guarantee the future of the system is to increase the number of years worked and the retirement age. This would reduce expenses by reducing the number of people qualifying for a pension, though it is unlikely to increase the number of those paying into the system or the amount of their contributions because of France's chronically high rates of unemployment, particularly among young people and those approaching retirement age. Up till now, reforms of the pensions system have been largely cosmetic, with attempts made from the early 1990s onwards to bring the private and public systems into line, and to end the advantages enjoyed by certain groups of workers, many of whom benefit from so-called "special systems" that allow them to retire earlier on full pensions. Reforms of this sort had to be abandoned in 1995 because of widespread strikes, the most important since 1968, that brought the country to a halt for several weeks. Since then, increasing numbers of people have been complementing the state system with private provision, legislation passed in France since 1995 having introduced a range of occupational and private pension schemes to a sometimes suspicious French public. General exasperation with the policies of the present government, and particular dislike of Sarkozy himself, may explain the majority support for the strikes, which seems to contradict the feeling in the French press that the country's pensions system is in need of further reform. According to an editorial that appeared in the newspaper Le Monde on 16 October, "the massive protests that have taken place against the reform of the retirement system have shown once again the extent to which France remains a conservative country, addicted to the status quo and to the current system." "Contrary to what he himself has let people believe, the president has not acted with unusual determination in attacking the present retirement system. Most European countries have already passed reforms dealing with the problem, and the present economic and financial crisis, bringing with it alarming levels of debt and public deficits, has obliged him to take action." The real reason for the massive protests against the proposals, the paper said, was because the government had not taken the time to "explain" the reforms to the public, and it reserved most of its criticisms for the opposition Socialist Party, responsible, the paper said, for spreading "false ideas" and "demagogy". Le Monde, a historically centre-left newspaper, was acquired earlier this year by a consortium of millionaire businessman. Could this editorial, reading more like something that might appear in Le Figaro or France's business press, be the first sign of a change in the paper's attitudes?
