His choice Emmanuel Macron implement the well-known Article 49.3 of the Constitution in order to bypassing the National Assembly and put into operation his new retirement account The presidential decree, said to have been passed in a brief meeting just minutes before the scheduled vote, provoked a strong reaction both inside and outside Parliament.

As Prime Minister Elizabeth Bourne entered the National Assembly to announce the president’s decision, opposition MPs rose to their feet, sang “Massaliotida” while holding signs reading “Not at 64” as the chants of “resign”, a scene rare in the French Parliament.

However, there was another hotbed of tension nearby. Upon hearing of Macron’s decision, and even before Bourne officially announced the activation of the article, a crowd of people, mostly students and union members, spontaneously gathered on the Place de la Concorde in front of the National Assembly. Many of them expressed a desire to occupy the square, but the gathering ended late at night with the intervention of law enforcement forces. Incidents followed on the streets of the expensive Champs Elysées district. There were also incidents in Marseille where banks and shop windows were damaged. Home Secretary Gerald Darmanin said 310 arrests were made overnight.

Leftist leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon stated that “something is going on here. People spontaneously gather and protest. I support them without any doubt,” and Elizabeth Bourne accused the opposition of “instigating violence in Parliament and on the streets.”

Yesterday morning, cleaners, on strike for the twelfth day, blocked the entrance to one of the country’s largest waste processing plants, Marseille port workers blocked the entrances to the marinas with wrecked cars, and students did not go to classes. The CGT union, one of the largest in the country, called on workers and laborers to close their jobs and protest.

Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Insubordinate France simultaneously filed a vote of no confidence in the government. However, given that a majority in the House of Representatives must support the proposal to lead the country to elections, the move does not seem to threaten Emmanuel Macron much.

A coalition of France’s largest trade unions, formed in recent weeks and now acting as a united front, announced a new nationwide general strike and rally in the country’s major cities on Thursday 23 March to put pressure on the government to “turn around 180 degrees”. For his part, Macron seems adamant, and while for many analysts, bypassing the National Assembly to pass legislation to raise the statutory retirement age from 62 to 64 “isolated” him from society and other parties, Macron himself seems to have moved on, and his government working on new, more “social” reforms.