PARIS (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 13th April, 2023) A spontaneous demonstration started in Paris as part of a protest against the pension reform an hour before the official protesters' march was scheduled to start from the Place de l'Opera, a Sputnik correspondent reported on Thursday.
The demonstrators' procession was supposed to start marching along the route coordinated with the Paris Prefecture from the Place de l'Opera to the Place de la Bastille at 2:00 p.m. (12:00 GMT). However, an hour before that several hundred protesters started a spontaneous demonstration in the area of the Champs-Elysees. The crowd was moving across open roads, blocking traffic. They were shooting off firecrackers and shouting protest slogans, the report said.
Mass protests across the country have started again in France on the eve of the Constitutional Council's final decision on the pension reform, the BFMTV channel reported on Thursday.
Large-scale demonstrations are being held in different large cities around the country, including in Nantes, Toulouse, Marseille and Rennes. The protesters have been barricading roads and starting fires as an expression of their discontent with the reform, BFMTV said.
In Paris, protesters gathered at the Gare de Lyon railway station at the call of General Confederation of Labor and Solidarity trade unions. The crowd consisting of railway and trade union workers piled up wooden pallets and stated they intended to hold a "surprise action," the Sputnik correspondent reported.
Later, the protesters managed to occupy a building owned by the LVMH (LVMH Louis Vuitton - Moet Hennessy ) luxury products maker in the 8th District of Paris. There, they unfolded a banner saying "The reform to the trash, we will not give up!" and shouting "Strike, block, Macron get out!" and setting hand flares alight.
Earlier in the day, protesters blocked the Constitutional Council building with a trash bin barricade that was taken apart shortly afterwards. Later, French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin issued a ban on any demonstrations near the Council.
The 12th nationwide protest against the controversial pension reform is currently taking place in France, gathering some 600,000 people, according to authorities. On April 14, the French Constitutional Council will vote on whether the bill complies with current national legislation. If it is approved, the law will go into effect on September 1.
On March 16, French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne announced that the government had adopted a law on raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 by 2030 by invoking Article 49.3 of the constitution, which allowed the bill to get passed without parliamentary approval. The decision sparked a strong backlash, prompting people to take to the streets across the country.
