French Senate passes pensions reform Bill

French senators defied mass strikes, riots and fuel blockades yesterday to pass President Nicolas Sarkozy’s fiercely contested Bill to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62.

The vote all but sealed the reform, the centrepiece of Mr Sarkozy’s agenda, and government now expects the text will next be reconciled with a lower house version before being definitively adopted in a final vote on Wednesday.

“The day will come when former opponents will thank the President and the government ... for acting responsibly,” Labour Minister Eric Woerth predicted just before the upper house approved the Bill by 177 votes to 153.

But amid street battles, and with strikes disrupting fuel supplies, labour unions vowed further protests over what they regard as an unfair reform, hoping to force Mr Sarkozy to back down even at this late stage in the game.

The protests have become the biggest battle of the right-wing president’s first term. With his poll ratings at an all-time low, he staked his credibility on a reform he says is essential to reduce France’s public deficit.

Opponents say the reforms unjustly penalise workers for the failures of global finance and have called instead for tax rises on banks and the rich.

“You’re voting for a reform that’s unfair, brutal and inefficient. This reform will be 85 per cent paid out of salaries, when we’re scarcely scraping the surface of capital gains,” declared left wing Senator Guy Fischer.

More than a million people took to the streets on Tuesday, the sixth day of nationwide action since early September, and this week rioters burned, smashed and looted while police fired tear gas and arrested hundreds.

Tension over the fuel standoff escalated dramatically ahead of Friday’s vote, when police broke up pickets besieging oil refineries and fuel depots.

Officers fired tear gas to disperse 200 demonstrators trying to block a fuel depot near the southern city of Toulouse, and moved in to seize control of the Grandpuits refinery, the main one serving the Paris region.

Strikers said three protesters were injured as the police went in, although at Grandpuits they did so without helmets or batons. Unions said a state official had issued them with a “requisition” ordering them back to work.

Strike leaders denounced the orders as an assault on the constitutional right to strike – one even compared them to the tactics of France’s World War II fascist regime – and union lawyers lodged legal challenges to them.