By Harold Meyerson of the American Prospect. Here is an Extract:
Emmanuel Macron and Bibi Netanyahu are only beginning to find this out.
French President Macron’s decision last Thursday to raise his nation’s retirement age from 62 to 64 by presidential diktat, once he realized that the National Assembly wasn’t going to enact it for him, will surely multiply the millions of Frenchmen and women who’d already taken to the streets, by a factor of … well, a lot. That conservatives in the National Assembly who’d previously supported raising the age had backed off their earlier support was partly due to polling that showed the public opposed the measure by more than a 2-to-1 margin. Another recent poll had shown that two-thirds of French people believed that French democracy wasn’t working very well.
That was before Macron’s thunderbolt. A quick poll that Harris Interactive conducted last Thursday, hours after Macron’s action, found that 82 percent disapproved of the use of constitutional provision 49.3—which enables laws to be made without having to pass the legislature—to raise the retirement age, while 65 percent favored continuing the protests in the street.
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