Welcome to the Euro Intelligence Podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me are Susanna Muncheng and Jack Smith.

Today we want to talk about strikes. Strikes in France, strikes in Germany, strikes in the UK.

We had another bad day of interruption in France yesterday. What happened? Is this a political crisis?

Is this ultimately about money? Where is this going?

Well, the funny thing in France, it wasn't about the salaries. It wasn't about the wages. It is in Germany and other EU countries.

So this one started with the pension reform. It was all about when to retire and for how many years you have to

work until you are actually eligible for the full pension. So this was until Emmanuel Macron,

his government, triggered the famous Article 49.3, which actually allows the pension reform

to pass without a vote in parliament.

That turned the whole introduction, the whole protest movement,

into sort of an outrage about the anti-democratic means that were employed to push the reform through.

Now, Emmanuel Macron came in television to, actually,

it was quite a defiant performance from him and saying,

it's necessary, we need to do the necessary, ready to sit on the table,

but only if the other side, the trend unions are ready to compromise as well, sign on some concessions.

But basically the message was, we need to turn the tech page, this was necessary,

let's move on to the next unemployment and other things.

That didn't go down well with the public at all.

This was a very confrontational, seen as a very confrontational intervention.

So the next morning, we had a huge show of numbers of protests.

We also had violent clashes of radicalized fringes.

We've seen all over the Bureau.

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