French labour reform plans spark violent protests
FRANCE: Police fought running battles with protesters yesterday as Emmanuel Macron faced the first major disorder of his presidency amid a wave of demonstrations against employment law reforms.
With tens of thousands of people taking part in marches in Paris and in the provinces, leftwingers hailed the protests as a success.
The centrist leader has vowed to avoid the sort of humiliating retreats that have undermined the authority of most of his predecessors in the past three decades. ‘‘We will hold firm,’’ said Bruno Le Maire, his economy minister.
Protesters cast the standoff as a defining moment in modern French history pitting the defenders of hard-won workers’ rights against a president they depict as the embodiment of modern capitalism. Some described the day as a first battle in what they foresee as a long war to stop Macron, a former merchant banker, from turning France into an Anglo Saxon-style nation.
The 39-year-old head of state wants to weaken the power of the unions and give bosses more freedoms to hire and fire, in an effort to modernise the economy and cut the unemployment rate of 9.5 per cent.
The stakes are high for the president, who has seen his popularity slump since taking office in May and who urgently needs a victory before tackling even more inflammatory issues, including state pension reform.
Jean-luc Melenchon, leader of the hard-left France Unbowed party, predicted that public anger would swell to such an extent that it would force Macron to abandon his pro-business agenda.
‘‘This country doesn’t want the liberal world ... France isn’t Britain.’’
The left-wing CGT union, which organised the protests, claimed there were 60,000 demonstrators in Paris and a similar number in Marseilles. The union said the 200 or so protests across France had drawn more than 400,000 people. Police put the figures much lower.
At the head of the demonstration in the capital were several hundred people wearing black hoods and masks and marching under anarchist banners. They clashed twice with police, who responded with tear gas, stun grenades and water cannon.
There was similar violence in Lyons and Nantes, where riot police struggled to contain protesters who attacked restaurants and other businesses.
Macron infuriated his opponents last week as he tried to underline his determination to reform France by pledging never to give way to ‘‘slackers, cynics and extremists’’. His suggestion that workers were opposing his reforms out of laziness provoked widespread mockery at yesterday’s protests. ‘‘Slackers of the world, unite,’’ one banner read.
Macron’s predecessor Francois Hollande watered down attempts to introduce similar reforms last year in the face of massive demonstrations. Macron believes he can succeed where Hollande failed because public opinion is now on the side of reform.
- The Times