???? Live: France faces major Labour Day protests over Macron’s pension reform

Issued on: 01/05/2023 – 13:57

12:48pm: Court allows Paris police to use drones

Paris’s administrative court upheld on Monday the city police’s decree allowing it to use drones during the Labour Day protests in the French capital.

This came after NGOs and lawyers’ unions had appealed to the court to invalidate the police’s order.

9:35am: Unions keen to show they are not giving up

Macron by-passed parliament in March to get his contentious pension reform on the statute books – transforming a political tussle into a full-blown crisis, as symbolised by furious protesters burning piles of uncollected rubbish on the streets of Paris.

Since France’s Constitutional Court upheld the bill in April, Macron has tried to turn the page on the national discontent, with a series of walkabouts across France’s regions. But he has been met by boos and the sound of banging pots and pans from protesters still up in arms at Macron raising the pension age from 62 to 64.

Now unions are keen to show that they are not giving up the fight.

“I think we’ll see hundreds of thousands of demonstrators, perhaps 1 million or 1.5 million, Laurent Berger, the head of France’s largest and most moderate major union the CFDT, said on Sunday.

French authorities expect 500,000 to 650,000 across the country – including 80,000 to 100,000 in Paris.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP, AP and Reuters)