PARIS (AP) — Thousands of demonstrators, including France’s new Nobel laureate, thronged the streets of Paris Sunday in a protest of anger over the bite of the emergency and pressure on President Emmanuel Macron’s government.
The march for wage increases and other demands organized through Macron’s left-wing belligerent parties set fire to what promises to be an uncomfortable week for his centrist government.
The shipping measures called for Tuesday threaten to be articulated with wage measures that have already affected refineries and fuel depots, causing a chronic gasoline shortage that is weakening the nerves of millions and other motorists who depend on their vehicles, with giant lines forming at gas stations.
Macron’s government is also on the defensive in parliament, where it lost its majority in June’s parliamentary elections. This makes it much more complicated for his centrist alliance to enforce its national calendar in the face of strengthened opponents and parliamentary discussion of the government’s budget. Plan for next year is proving complicated.
In an incendiary speech at the Paris march, far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon accused Macron of being “fried” and plunging France into “chaos. “
He predicted Macron’s ministers would have to push the budget through the cramped space of parliament by giving lawmakers a vote, a moot prospect that drew loud boos from the crowd.
Organizers said more than 140,000 protesters marched. Paris police said they did not have a quick estimate of the length of the dense, flag-waving crowd that filled squares and streets. There have been some outbreaks of vandalism at the margins, with trash cans set on fire and bank tellers vandalized. Riot police maintained order.
Alongside Mélenchon, France’s Annie Ernaux, who won this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, stood alongside Mélenchon. Mélenchon, who was twice defeated by Macron in the presidential election, said the protest was “a great success. “
Organizers called it a “march opposed to the higher burden of inaction of life and climate. “income, and greater taxation of the profits of the ruling.
Lawmaker Christophe Bex of the left-wing France Insoumise party, or France Insoumise, called the march a “show of force” to show “that another world is despite everything imaginable if we are all combined and all united. “
Another walker, retired railwayman Eric Doire, said: “What we need is for everyone to be able to decently with the buying power they had before. “