Aurelia Butler

PARIS (Reuters) -French President Emmanuel Macron’s flagship pension reform will enter into force swiftly, officials said on Friday after it received the Constitutional Council’s approval despite months of street protests and strikes.The legislation, which pushes up the age at which one can draw a pension to 64 from 62, remains deeply unpopular, and spontaneous protests broke out when the Constitutional Council’s decision was announced.Protesters gathered outside Paris City Hall holding banners reading “climate of anger” and “no end to the strikes until the reform is withdrawn”, in a sign the Council’s verdict was unlikely to end widespread anger with Macron and his reform.Some burnt trash bins as they marched through Paris, singing a chant popular with anti-Macron protesters: “We are here, we are here, even if Macron does not want it, we are here.”Opinion polls show a vast majority reject the policy changes, as well as the fact that the government pushed the bill through parliament without a final vote it might have lost.”All the labour unions are calling on the President of the Republic to show some wisdom, listen and understand what is happening in the country and not to promulgate this law,” the leader of the CGT union Sophie Binet said.In a joint statement, unions said this was “the only way to soothe the anger in the country.”But officials shrugged off the request, saying the text would be turned into law in the coming days. Labour Minister Olivier Dussopt said it should enter into force on Sept. 1 as initially planned.’THE FIGHT CONTINUES’The Constitutional Council said the government’s actions were in line with the constitution and approved raising the legal retirement age, with only peripheral measures meant to boost employment for older workers struck down on the grounds that they did not belong in this legislation.”The country must continue to move forward, work, and face the challenges that await us,” Macron said earlier this week, looking to move on to other reforms.But the opposition said they would not back down and unions said they would not attend a meeting Macron wanted to organise with them on Tuesday.”We won’t give up. There will be a great May 1st,” said teacher Gilles Sornay, 65, at the Paris rally, referring to protests planned for international workers’ day.”The fight continues,” hard-left leader Jean-Luc Melenchon declared.Separately, the Constitutional Council rejected a proposal by the opposition to organise a citizens’ referendum on the pension reform.The opposition has tabled another bid for a referendum, which is expected to be reviewed by the Council in early May.Political observers say the widespread discontent over the government’s reform could have longer-term repercussions, including a possible boost for the far right.Far-right leader Marine Le Pen wrote on Twitter that “the political fate of the pension reform is not sealed,” urging voters to back those who oppose it in the next election so that they can scrap it.Macron says the French must work longer or else the pension budget will fall billions of euros into the red each year by the end of the decade.But the pension system is a cornerstone of France’s cherished social protection model and trade unions say the money can be found elsewhere, including by taxing the rich more heavily.While attention has focused on the retirement age of 62, only 36% of French workers retire at that age and another 36% already retire older on account of requirements to pay into the system for at least 42 years in order to be able to claim a full pension.    That means the normal retirement age for a French worker who started working at the age of 22 was 64.5, marginally above a European Union average of 64.3, according to OECD figures based on 2020 data. More

The writer is executive director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies Asia, and author of ‘The Billionaire Raj’ Two recent Beijing trips by global leaders have shed light on the many paradoxes of a future age of economic decoupling.A visit by Emmanuel Macron, president of France, and Ursula von der Leyen, European Commission president, last week generated waves of controversy in the west. Another, by Anwar Ibrahim, prime minister of Malaysia, went almost unnoticed but in many ways proved more illuminating of the challenges of decoupling.Macron travelled to Beijing with von der Leyen to present a united European approach to China. But he also brought a phalanx of business leaders, opening Paris up to accusations of mercantile foreign policy and leaving Europe looking divided. A few days earlier, von der Leyen had delivered a speech in which she argued that Europe should “de-risk” rather than decouple its Chinese ties. Full decoupling was undesirable, she said, so the west should instead reduce risks in strategic sectors such as semiconductors, batteries and critical minerals. This week G7 finance ministers also talked up the need for supply chain “diversity” with plans to “empower” emerging economies.Anwar’s visit to Beijing could hardly have been more different. Here there was no talk of decoupling. Rather, Malaysia’s leader hailed China’s economic prowess and encouraged greater investment. He took a group of Malaysian businesses too, returning with deals worth almost $39bn, on paper at least.The sight of leaders from the “global south” streaming back to Beijing should alarm the west. Having previously focused on solving China’s Covid-19 crisis and securing his own third term, Xi Jinping is once again flexing his diplomatic muscles — from peace deals in Ukraine and the Middle East to investment deals for south-east Asian neighbours.While western leaders are trying to unpick decades of globalisation, Asian nations from Bangladesh and Indonesia to Malaysia and Thailand view China as central to their economic future. Rather than decoupling, they seek more trade with Beijing. And, paradoxically, this is an outcome western policies might actually deliver.Global businesses now talk about “friend-shoring”, meaning moving production towards geopolitical partners such as India, Mexico or Poland. Alternatively, they might set up facilities in south-east Asia, where most nations are geopolitically neutral between Beijing and Washington. The likes of Malaysia and Vietnam are often predicted to be winners from decoupling, able to hoover up western businesses as they leave China.There are problems with this account, however, the first being that so far decoupling has barely begun to happen. Semiconductors are one notable exception, given successful American attempts to stop global chipmakers selling to China. But for all the talk of supply chain de-risking and resilience, similar moves in other sectors are hard to spot.Western multinationals talk more often about a “China plus one” strategy, in which they keep making things in China but also pick another manufacturing base, Malaysia say, as a hedge. But imagine for a second that geopolitical events take a further turn for the worse, western companies get spooked, and decoupling does begin to move forward more quickly. What then? Here, many in the west assume that shifting production will make them less reliant on China, while the decoupling process will probably draw countries such as Malaysia and Vietnam closer to the west itself. Both assumptions are questionable, to say the least.Take Samsung. Its decision in 2020 to shift production to Vietnam means the South Korean giant now assembles millions of phones in Vietnamese factories each year. Many are then exported to the west. Many components that go into those phones are still made in China, however, so Vietnam must also import more of those too.Vietnam’s bilateral trade with China has rocketed in recent years, with similar patterns discernible in the rest of what is sometimes called “factory Asia”. Forthcoming research from Aaditya Mattoo, an economist at the World Bank, suggests that east Asian nations have lately been exporting more to the US but also importing much more from China.The result is a double paradox. First, rather than connecting emerging economies more tightly to the west, decoupling often leaves countries in regions such as south-east Asia more economically dependent upon China, not less. Second, while shifting supply chains around the world appears to leave the west less reliant on China, the continuing need for components that still mostly come from there means the fundamental vulnerability remains. Before her recent Beijing visit, von der Leyen argued that “it is neither viable — nor in Europe’s interest — to decouple from China”. She is right. And given the complex and intertwined structure of modern globalisation, even the task of partially reducing dependence on the Chinese economy is likely to turn out to be much harder than it looks. More

Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has said he wants to work with Beijing to “balance world geopolitics” as he wrapped up a three-day visit to China aimed at deepening relations between the two nations.“We want to raise the level of the strategic partnership between our countries, expand trade flows and, together with China, balance world geopolitics,” said Lula, who since returning to office for a third term in January has sought to reassert Brazil’s role on the international stage.In particular, the 77-year-old has championed creating a more multipolar world and reviving multilateral organisations — themes close to the heart of Beijing’s international diplomacy.Lula was warmly welcomed to China, where he was greeted by cheering children dancing to the Brazilian song Novo Tempo and was lauded by Chinese president Xi Jinping as his “good old friend”. The two sides signed more than a dozen accords — worth $10bn — in areas ranging from infrastructure investment to the construction of satellites and trade facilitation.Brazil and China are both members of the Brics association, a group of developing nations also including India, Russia and South Africa, which Lula has sought to reinvigorate since returning to office.During a speech in Shanghai on Thursday, he called on the group to come up with an alternative currency to the dollar for use in trade between them.“Every night I ask myself why all countries have to base their trade on the dollar,” said Lula, raising eyebrows among policymakers in Washington.The Brazilian leader struck a further note of defiance to Washington in another speech given alongside Xi, during which Lula noted he had visited the Chinese telecom company Huawei, which is subject to US sanctions.“Yesterday we made a visit to Huawei, a demonstration that we want to say to the world that we don’t have any bias in our relationship with the Chinese, and that no one will prohibit Brazil from improving its relationship with China,” Lula said. During an earlier meeting with Zhao Leji, head of the country’s rubber stamp parliament and the third most senior official of the Communist party, Lula underlined his ambition of rebalancing the world order.“Our interests in the relationship with China are not just commercial. We have political interests and we have interests in building a new geopolitics to change world governance by giving more representation to the United Nations,” said Lula.The focus on multilateralism is a marked departure from the approach taken by his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, who prioritised bilateral ties with the US under former president Donald Trump and other nations led by populist leaders such as Hungary and Israel. “It is a universalist foreign policy,” Mauro Vieira, Brazil’s foreign minister, told the Financial Times last month.Ahead of the visit to Beijing, Lula had said he would discuss with Xi the creation of a “peace club” of countries to mediate an end to the conflict in Ukraine.In a joint statement on Friday, the two countries emphasised that the only way out of the Ukraine conflict was through negotiation. But while the message on Ukraine reflected some of China’s points, it did not fully mirror Beijing’s position paper on the conflict that the west has criticised as pro-Russia.“Lula believes that Brazil has something to contribute, particularly when it comes to the Russia-Ukraine war. Many people understand this as a naive [but] Lula understands China is a key actor in trying to put pressure on Russia,” said Felipe Loureiro, a professor of international relations at the University of São Paulo. “The difficulty is that China has a clear pro-Russia stance, even though it positions itself as a neutral country.”Lula failed to appear at a press conference in the Brazilian embassy scheduled for late on Friday night, with aides saying he was too tired. But finance minister Fernando Haddad said the country’s overtures to China were not intended to alienate the US. “The country [Brazil] is too big to be choosing partners,” Haddad told journalists. “Brazil has the size to do partnerships with these big blocs and with other countries in bilateral accords. It doesn’t make any sense that you are forced to make a choice that if you get close to one, you have to distance yourself from the other.”  More

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