🌍 French protests over Macron’s pension reforms

🗺️ AROUND THE WORLD

🇫🇷 FRANCE | PROTESTS

Protestors continue to clash with police in Paris

Briefly: French protestors continued to rally over the weekend after President Macron's government pushed controversial pension reforms through without a vote.

France is 'ageing'. This doesn't mean everyone's watching more Matlock, it means folks are living longer and having fewer kids. So there are now fewer workers paying into the pension fund, and more retirees drawing it down. And that’s unsustainable.

But who should fix this? Macron’s critics say France should instead tax the wealthy or get firms to make more pension contributions. But taxing the rich is like nailing jello foie gras to the wall – and when you make it more expensive for companies to hire people, companies tend to hire fewer people.

It’s the seventh time France has attempted pension reform since the 1980s, when President Mitterrand cut the retirement age to 60. President Sarkozy then jacked it back up to 62 in 2010. And Macron has long campaigned on raising it further to 64. Now he’s actually doing it.

France isn’t the only country dealing with an ageing population. Japan is trying to re-balance its demographics by encouraging more women to work. Korea has spent $200B trying to get couples to have more babies. In Australia and the US, young immigrants have helped slow the ageing process.

Intrigue’s take: What's really notable in France is how much this issue has fired up both the far right (some would include Marine Le Pen in that) and the far left (there’s a French Communist Party, and it’s not happy).

Macron’s government will likely survive the no-confidence vote scheduled for today (Monday). And if he gets his way, his legacy will be a more sustainable pension system. But if Macron doesn’t get his way, his legacy could well be a more radicalised and polarised France.

Also worth noting:

• Striking garbage workers have left more than 10,000 tonnes of trash rotting in the streets of Paris, but they’re still letting some garbage trucks through to incinerators "to limit the risk of an epidemic".

• Two thirds of French people oppose Macron’s reforms, and his popularity has plummeted to just 28%, the lowest in four years.

Today’s briefing is sponsored by Highland Titles

🇷🇺 RUSSIA | ICC

Putin is now wanted by the ICC

Briefly: The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued a warrant for the arrest of Vladimir Putin on Friday. Both the Russian President and Russian children's rights commissioner Maria Lvova-Belovaare are wanted in connection with the unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia, which constitutes a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

At least 6,000 Ukrainian children have been sent to facilities across Russian-occupied Crimea and Russia since the invasion.

But Putin’s not getting arrested any time soon: Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov described the ICC’s warrant as “outrageous and unacceptable”, and reminded everyone that Russia’s not actually an ICC member.

Intrigue’s take: Peskov is distracting from the real issue, which is precisely what he’s paid to do. Nobody’s expecting Russia to suddenly realise the errors of its ways and hand its president over for a war crimes trial in The Hague. But that doesn’t mean the ICC’s arrest warrant is pointless:

• It stains Russia with the implicit condemnation of the ICC’s 123 members.

• It isolates Putin because all ICC members now have an obligation to detain him if he enters their territory.

• And it encourages Putin’s enemies at home (see next point).

Nobody (including us) expects Putin behind bars any time soon. But nobody expected to see former Serbian president Slobodan Milošević there either. Then a popular uprising toppled his regime, and Milošević was sitting in a Dutch jail a few months later.

What we’re saying is, history’s full of plot twists.

Also worth noting:

• Russia isn’t the only major country that’s not an ICC signatory. Others include the US, China, India and Ukraine.

• Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin paid a ‘surprise’ visit to occupied Mariupol in Ukraine; “[h]e has come in person to see what he has done”, Mariupol's Ukrainian mayor in exile Vadym Boychenko told the BBC.

👀 EXTRA INTRIGUE

Monday funday:

• Australia’s at war with birds, again. But this time it’s not ostriches, it's a small invasive species of Corella cockatoos.

• Netflix-famous Joe Exotic, aka ‘The Tiger King’, has announced his 2024 presidential bid from prison. A reality TV star who’s had trouble with the law running for President? Absurd!

• A 46-year old project manager will walk the London marathon backwards to raise money for Ukraine.

• New archaeological works in Egypt have uncovered a small sphinx with a “smiley face and two dimples” – a nice change from all the other stony-faced statues.

 📊 CHART OF THE DAY

What goes up…

Benchmark crude oil prices have decreased by 15% in little more than a week as the ongoing Silicon Valley Bank and Credit Suisse dramas spook global markets.

Thursday’s poll: Do you think there's still value in Russia recovering the wreckage of the US drone?

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 💽 Yes, to study the drone's tech (46%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🎞️ Yes, to see what the US was gathering intelligence on (8%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ ✊ Yes, as a symbolic f* you gesture (38%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🤷 No, its drives were wiped remotely then fried by water (8%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🖋️ Other (write in!) (1%)

Your two cents:

• 🤷 G.L: “After 20 years of War in Afghanistan it would be naïve to think the Russians have never seen the insides of an MQ-9. This is not the first Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) to crash.”

• 🖋️ D.M: “Considering this contributes to already high tensions, despite us being past this probably, it would be a good gesture to leave it and allow the US or allies to recover the remains.”