Emmanuel Macron can think of little else. The last thing he wants is for his planned pensions reform — opposed by the large majority of the population — to provoke a general shutdown. So, with a broad coalition of trade unions planning to strike against this latest measure, for weeks the government has been working behind the scenes to try to stop the mobilization from going ahead.

The Macron government’s battle plan targeted the sectors it deemed most “at risk” — the types of workers most able to paralyze the country, given their geographical location or their level of union membership. That particularly meant those working for the SNCF (the national rail company) and indeed the RATP (Paris’s bus and metro service), which are often in the forefront of social movements in France.

For Bertrand Hammache, a CGT union official at the RATP, “The government is truly afraid of the scale of the mobilization. It has begun bilateral meetings with each union to try and reassure us over what the reform means — and give us a reason to give up on the strike. But that’s out of the question.”