France’s Pension Firestorm Reaches Malta: What Valletta Learns From Parisian Protests

France’s Manufactured Drama: How Parisian Protests Echo in Valletta’s Cafés
By Luke Caruana, Hot Malta correspondent

Valletta – When French President Emmanuel Macron rammed through his pension reform without a parliamentary vote last month, Maltese commuters scrolling their phones on the 8-a.m. ferry from Sliema to the capital saw the same looping footage: burning barricades on the Place de la Concorde, tear-gas clouds drifting past the Ferris wheel. By 9:15 the videos had already been re-posted in seven different Maltese Facebook groups, captioned in Maltenglish: “Could this ever happen here?”

The short answer is no—our island doesn’t have a pension age to raise; we already retired at 61 for women and 62 for men. Yet the long answer is more interesting, because the French “manufactured drama” is playing like a dubbed telenovela in Malta’s national conversation, revealing how deeply we still measure ourselves against the Hexagon.

In the shadow of the Manoel Theatre—built in 1731 by a Portuguese Grand Master who wanted Valletta to feel like a slice of Paris—local actors are rehearsing a Maltese translation of Molière’s “Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme”. Director Simone Spiteri says the timing is uncanny. “We’re staging 17th-century French satire while WhatsApp pings us live updates from the Champs-Élysées. The themes—class anxiety, social climbing—feel imported yet familiar.” Tickets sold out in 48 hours, twice as fast as last year’s panto.

Across Strait Street, once the red-light artery where French sailors drank anisette, 68-year-old retired dockworker Ċensu Zahra nurses a ftira and watches France24. “We used to strike in the 70s, but we never flipped a bench in front of the Law Courts,” he shrugs. “Maybe because we’re smaller; everyone knows your nanna.” Still, his pension—€227 a week—beats the French minimum, and he admits to a quiet pride that Malta’s compulsory private second pillar, introduced in 2021, is cushioning the demographic crunch. “Macron should’ve copied us,” he winks.

Not everyone is relaxed. Maria Grech, 29, a software tester who moved back from Lyon last year, says the French unrest has jolted her peer group. “We lived through the gilets jaunes, the fuel protests, but seeing CRS riot police outside my old flat on Rue de la Roquette still gives me chills.” She now hosts a weekly French-language supper club in Gżira; attendance spiked after the pension story broke. “Maltese twenty-somethings want the scoop: is Paris really on fire, or is it media theatre? I tell them it’s both—Macron manufactures a crisis, then choreographs the response.”

The Maltese manufacture drama too, just on different stages. Last Saturday, thousands squeezed into Floriana’s Granaries for the Labour Party’s mass meeting, waving red flags that looked suspiciously like the CGT union banners parading in Marseille. The difference? Our rallies end with pastizzi and a DJ set; theirs end with broken shop windows. Yet the rhetorical overlap—anti-elite slogans, invocations of “the people”—is impossible to ignore. Political scientist Maria Pisani argues that Malta imports French protest iconography because we lack a physical square large enough for genuine unrest. “We vent on Facebook, then go to the beach,” she notes. “The French vent in the street, then go to the bistro. Both are performances; the set design changes.”

Tourism operators feel the ripple effect. Air Malta waived change fees for Paris flights during peak strike days; Ryanair marketed €19.99 “Escape the Riots” specials into Malta International. Five French-language schools in St Julian’s reported surging bookings from Parisian lycée teachers eager to send students to “safe, sunny, strike-free Malta”. Hotel occupancy in Sliema jumped 6% year-on-year in March, largely on French bookings. “They’re not canceling Europe,” says Corinthia’s revenue manager, “they’re rerouting it.”

Still, solidarity gestures sprout. The Malta Chamber of Commerce sent a conciliatory tweet—half in French—saluting “le dialogue social”. Activists from Moviment Graffitti projected the French tricolore onto the Triton Fountain for one night, captioned “Pensions are a human right”. Even the band of the Armed Forces of Malta slipped “La Marseillaise” into its Sunday concert in the Upper Barrakka Gardens, prompting bemused tourists to stand at half-mast attention.

Bottom line: Macron’s “manufactured drama” is a Rorschach test for Malta. We watch, we appropriate, we breathe a small-island sigh of relief that our capital is only 0.8 km wide—too tiny for a proper barricade. Yet in the process we confront our own anxieties: an ageing population, a labour market addicted to imported workers, a political culture that prefers choreographed consensus to confrontation. The French may go back to 64; we’ll stay at 61, but the conversation they forced upon Europe lands on our limestone shores with a gentle splash, reminding us that even 1,600 kilometres away, manufactured or not, drama has a passport.