France: The French Senate has approved President Emmanuel Macron’s unpopular pension reform plan, amid thousands of protesters rallying across the country to oppose the changes.

Senators passed the reforms by 195 votes to 112, bringing the package another step closer to becoming law. A committee will frame a final draft, which will be submitted to the Senate and National Assembly for a final vote.

“An important step was taken this evening with a broad vote on the pension reform text in the Senate,” the French Prime Minister, Ms. Elisabeth Borne, stated after the vote, adding that she believed the government had a parliamentary majority to get the reforms passed into law.

“After hundreds of hours of discussions, the Senate adopted the pension reform plan. It is a key step to make a reform happen that will guarantee the future of our pension system,” the Prime Minister wrote on Twitter.

Ms. Borne added that she was “totally committed to ensuring the text will be definitively adopted in the coming days.”

Since the Senate has adopted the bill, it will be reviewed by a joint committee of lower and upper house legislators.

If the committee agrees on a text, a final vote in both chambers is likely to take place in the upcoming days. But the outcome of that still seems uncertain in the lower chamber, the National Assembly, where Mr. Macron’s party needs allies’ votes for a majority.

Unions, which have fiercely opposed the measures, still hoped to force Macron to back down, though the day’s protests against the reform were far smaller than some previous ones.

According to the data from the interior ministry, 368,000 demonstrators marched through various cities. Several sectors in the French economy have been targeted by union calls for indefinite strikes, including rail and air transport, power stations, natural gas terminals and rubbish collection.

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