Measured pace of reforms best for Macron's pension overhaul, experts say

French President Emmanuel Macron should not back down from his plan to reform the pension system, but a slower pace and smaller steps might appease the public's concerns, analysts said.

All the big French trade unions for the first time urged members to take to the streets on Tuesday, joining the 13th straight day of street protests and a nationwide strike by public-sector workers. Yet they failed to rouse enough support to force Macron to give up his pension reform proposals.

According to the French interior ministry, only about 615,000 people across the country answered the union leaders' Tuesday call. That showing would represent a sharp decline from the 806,000 protesters who appeared on the first day of action on Dec 5.

Over the past two weeks, the absence of public-sector workers has crippled French transport networks, shut down schools and disrupted hospitals and airports. The strikers and street protesters say they will persist even during the Christmas holiday, which is only one week away.

The French government is sticking to the plan to push forward a reform plan that would merge 42 existing pension systems into one. Macron also wants to raise to 64－from the current 62－the retirement age at which people qualify for a full pension. That proposal triggered the mass protests.

Macron's government has opened the door for negotiations. Macron on late Tuesday named lawmaker Laurent Pietraszewski as the new pensions chief. He will lead negotiations with the unions scheduled to start on Wednesday. He replaces Jean-Paul Delevoyee, architect of the pension reforms, who resigned on Monday following revelations that he hadn't declared some of his private-sector income.

Cui Hongjian, director of the Department for European Studies at the China Institute of International Studies, said that Macron mistakenly had made many compromises while dealing with the yellow vest movement last year. He mustn't repeat that mistake or his reform ambitions will be impossible to realize, he said.

He said the French public expects Macron to boost the economy, yet not enough people believe he can carry out pension reform.

"I think Macron should better explain the pension reform plan to the public, including the purposes and targets of reform, which is not clear enough at the moment," he said.

Cui said that Macron is eager to push forward, but rather than implementing a package of reforms at one time, he might be more successful with the public if he introduced small steps on the way to implementing the complex plan.

"Taking reform step by step will be less likely to meet with huge opposition," he said.

He Yun, an assistant professor at Hunan University's School of Public Management, said that the strike and protests against pension reform are better organized than the yellow vest movement last year, but they haven't won the same degree of support from the French public.

She said that French people are growing uneasy about violent tactics such as occurred during the yellow vest movement. That national movement was a response to a gasoline price hike. If the current protests take a more violent turn, as already seen in some parts of France, they may garner even less support and eventually peter out as the yellow vest movement did, she said.

Reuters and AFP contributed to this story.