The LR mayor of Meaux and the former Minister of the Budget, Jean-François Copé, said he was in favor of November 11 stopping being a public holiday.
An idea that divides. While this November 11 is a public holiday on which the armistice of the First World War is commemorated, the question of eliminating a second non-working day in order to save money returns to the table. The LR mayor of Meaux, Jean-François Copé, believes this Monday at the microphone of France Inter that we “do not need a public holiday to commemorate”.
“There are a thousand ways to commemorate without not working. Or that means that we have 65 million French people who are at the foot of the war memorials on November 11th. That would be known,” he said. declared.
If he says he “understands” wanting to preserve “symbolic moments” like July 14, the former MP thinks that eliminating a public holiday is “a way of saving money in a country which needs to spend a lot to maintain its social model.
“We actually have to work more”
“We actually have to work more,” concludes Jean-Pierre Raffarin’s former Budget Minister under Jacques Chirac, then boasting of having “courageously” abolished the day of Pentecost. Since 2004, Pentecost has indeed become a day of solidarity. Or one day worked, but not paid, to, according to the law, contribute to the financing of actions in favor of the autonomy of elderly or disabled people.
In fact, since 2008, the company can choose the date of the solidarity day itself, split it over several days or continue to pay for it normally.
The debate on the elimination of a second public holiday was relaunched by a senatorial report, published at the end of September, which estimated that the creation of a second day of solidarity “would generate 2.4 billion euros in additional revenue” in order to finance the operation of nursing homes.
Subsequently questioned on this subject, Budget Minister Laurent Saint-Martin showed himself open to a parliamentary discussion on this subject. “I think that everything that allows our country to show that we can work more to participate in the recovery effort is going in the right direction,” he declared on TF1 without naming a particular day and recalling that this idea was not that of the government.
For his part, the Minister of the Economy and Finance Antoine Armand considered “the proposal very interesting, to be looked at closely”.
However, this idea does not seem to please the French. According to an Elabe poll for BFMTV, published on October 30, 69% are opposed to the establishment of a second day of solidarity to replace a public holiday, with 40% even being very opposed.
