Constitutional council’s ruling means government can pass law to increase minimum eligible age as early as next week
France’s highest constitutional court has approved Emmanuel Macron’s proposals to raise the minimum pension age from 62 to 64.
The ruling means the government can pass the French president’s unpopular plans to increase the minimum eligible pension age as early as next week, to be in force by the end of this year.
The government had hoped the ruling would put an end to three months of protests, but police were on high alert for more demonstrations on Friday night. Hundreds of demonstrators marched from Paris city hall through the Marais area, with several bins set alight and firefighters tackling blazes.
A fire was started in the entrance of a police station in the Brittany city of Rennes and blazed until it was put out by officers. The interior minister Gérald Darmanin tweeted that it was “unacceptable”.
The constitutional council, which was asked by the prime minister, Élisabeth Borne, to examine whether the pension proposals were in line with the constitution, struck down some lesser elements. These included measures designed to increase employment for older workers, which were rejected on the grounds that they did not belong in legislation that was tacked on to a social security budget bill.
Macron now has two weeks to enact the law.
Borne tweeted that there was “no winner, or loser” and that the law had reached the end of its democratic process.
Mathilde Panot of the radical left party La France Insoumise said the left was “more mobilised than ever” to stop the law. The Socialist party politician Olivier Faure said it was a “bad, unjust and illegitimate law”.
Jordan Bardella, of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party, said the pensions row had shown the “vast gap” between Macron and the people.
After three months of protests, some of them violent, and clashes with police, the political crisis is not yet over. Trade unions and opposition politicians continued to urge the government to shelve the increase in the pension age to 64, with polls showing two-thirds of the French public oppose the measure.
Macron implied earlier in the day on a visit to Notre Dame that he was not someone to back down against street protests. “Stay the course, that’s my motto,” he said.
In Paris, armed riot police were on standby near the heavily guarded building of the constitutional council. All street demonstrations were banned from the area and some metro stations closed. Special three-metre-high security screens were put in place. Police were expecting up to 10,000 protesters in the capital after the ruling, a source told Agence France-Presse. Hundreds of students and high-school pupils gathered to protest near Paris’s Gare Saint-Lazare in the early afternoon.