Two days after an embarrassing early exit from the World Cup, a second strike hit France. As if the one by the county’s national soccer team wasn’t bad enough.
In place of disagreements between a badmouth player and a largely incompetent coach, Thursday’s strike concerned pension reform — a sensitive subject here in France. In short, the conservative government wants to raise the retirement age by two years — from 60 to 62.
The Interior Ministry estimated 797,000 protesters participated in nearly 200 marches across the country, numbers that dwarfed a similar demonstration in May.
I attended the demonstration in Paris. “My first one,” I told Thomas, a friend I was staying with for my weeklong stay in the city.
He warned me of the strike on Wednesday night. With one in four metro trains out of operation, navigating the city bustling with summer tourists would be even more difficult come Thursday morning. He then told me about the demonstration. I told him I wanted to go.
By 1 p.m. Thursday I had squeezed onto the metro headed for Place de la République, the staging grounds for the demonstration. I could feel the train struggle under the weight of the over-packed cars as it crept toward my destination.
Demonstrators began chanting slogans while unraveling their flags and banners. Dozens poured out of the metro station onto Place de la République, where thousands more greeted them.
Inside the sweltering mass of people, French techno blared from dozens of car stereos, union leaders yelled through PA systems and bullhorns, and demonstrators organized themselves for the march to Place de la Bastille.
I approached a group of men who wore neon-green vests and yellow hard hats. They were “tree climbers,” as one man described to me in broken English.
“Why are you demonstrating?” I asked him. His answer captured the spirit of the day — It was the only way to get the government to listen.
“If Sarkozy was here someone would hit him,” he said in reference to France’s increasingly unpopular president.
The pension reforms will likely pass. If the system remains unchanged, France will face a funding shortfall of 72 billion to 115 billion Euros by 2050, according to the BBC. The French government says such reform is necessary given the country’s rising public debt.
Americans may find it difficult to sympathize with their French counterparts, seeing as France’s 35-hour workweek and retirement age are among the lowest in the Western world.
Yet debt and deficit are things most Americans have grown accustomed to in recent months. Kansas faces an estimated $510 million budget deficit for the 2011 fiscal year.
The United States’ national deficit for the 2009 fiscal year was approximately 9.91 percent of gross domestic product, or $1.4 trillion — considerably higher than France’s deficit of 7.5 percent last year. And even that’s too high for the French government, which promises to bring it under 3 percent by 2013. Chances aren’t likely President Barack Obama will do the same by the end of his term, as he had once promised.
When was the last time 200 simultaneous demonstrations took place in the United States? Have Americans grown so disillusioned by government that they no longer feel capable of making a difference outside of election years? Is our political apathy a result of government’s unwillingness to listen, or do we simply need to give politicians a chance to hear us out?
These are the questions that came to my mind that day. As measures taken to manage public debt grow increasingly noticeable, the stark contrast between France’s demonstrations and America’s lack thereof is something to keep mind.