The French Senate has adopted President Emmanuel Macron’s unpopular pension reform plan in the wake of a seventh day of demonstrations that were not as large as authorities had expected.
One hundred and ninety-five members of the upper house of the French Parliament voted for the text, whose key measure is raising the retirement age by two years to 64, while 112 voted against.
The protests – and rolling strikes that have affected refineries, public transport and garbage collections – aimed to pressure the government to withdraw the pension plan, which it said is essential to ensure the pension system does not run out of money.
The Senate worked through hundreds of hours of discussions, and spent 13 hours debating over Article 7 alone, the contentious paragraphs about raising the retirement age.