Large-scale celebration

Military troops participating in the march past during the Bastille Day parade on the Champs-Elysees Avenue in Paris. The theme of this year’s Bastille Day is ‘fraternity in arms’ and features Spanish gendarmes, Belgian armoured vehicles and an Airbus A400M military transport plane from the German defence fleet.

PARIS: France’s military had something extra to celebrate as it showed off its might for Bastille Day celebrations: a budget boost from President Emmanuel Macron.

The pomp-filled parade down Paris’ Champs-Elysees suffered a couple of glitches, as two police motorcycles crashed during a performance and there was an apparent colour miscalculation in the red-white-and-blue smoke sprayed by fighter jets zooming over the Paris skyline.

Overall the event was about celebrating France’s security forces.

Thousands of people, many of them tourists, thronged the Champs Elyses avenue to watch the march past involving 4,290 soldiers, 220 vehicles, 250 horses, 64 jets and 30 helicopters.

Macron flagged off the two-hour massive military parade and was joined by two guests of honour: Singapore Prime Minister Hsien Loong and Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono.

Macron presided over the Paris parade, which commemorates the storming of the Bastille prison in Paris on July 14, 1789, and the beginning of the French Revolution. Macron signed a new military budget on the eve of the parade aimed at lifting defence spending to two per cent of GDP, as promised to Nato.

The rise had long been planned, but came just after a contentious Nato summit in which President Donald Trump assailed allies for not spending enough on defence.