Rioters face down police
PARIS: AntiGovernment ‘‘yellow vest’’ protesters faced off with French riot police in Paris on Saturday, hurling projectiles, torching cars and vandalising shops and restaurants in a fourth weekend of unrest that has shaken President Emmanuel Macron’s authority.
Police used teargas, water cannon and horses to charge protesters on roads fanning out from the Champs Elysees boulevard, but encountered less violence than a week ago, when the capital witnessed its worst unrest since the 1968 student riots.
As night fell and many demonstrators started returning home, Interior Minister Christophe Castaner said there had been about 10,000 protesters in Paris by early evening and about 125,000 across the country.
Bordeaux, Lyon, Toulouse and other cities also saw major clashes between protesters and police on Saturday.
‘‘The situation is now under control,’’ Castaner said at a joint news conference with Prime Minister Edouard Philippe.
He said about 120 demonstrators and nearly 20 police officers had been injured nationwide. Nearly 1000 people had been arrested, 620 of them in Paris, after police found potential weapons such as hammers and baseball bats on them.
Philippe said police would remain vigilant through the night as some protesters continued to roam the city.
Groups of youths, many of them masked, continued skirmishing with police in the Place de la Republique area as some stores were looted.
Named after the fluorescent safety vests that French motorists must carry, the ‘‘yellow vest’’ protests erupted out of nowhere on November 17, when nearly 300,000 demonstrators nationwide took to the streets to denounce high living costs and Macron’s liberal economic reforms.
Demonstrators say the reforms favour the wealthy and do nothing to help the poor and billed Saturday’s protest ‘‘Act IV’’ of their protest after three consecutive Saturdays of rioting.
The Government last week cancelled a planned rise in taxes on petrol and diesel in a bid to defuse the situation but the protests have morphed into a broader antiMacron rebellion.
The protests are jeopardising a fragile economic recovery in France just as the Christmas holiday season starts.
Retailers have lost an estimated ¤1 billion ($NZ1.66 billion) in revenue since the protests erupted and shares in tourismrelated shares had their worst week in months.
Swathes of Paris’ affluent Right Bank north of the Seine river were locked down on Saturday, with luxury boutiques boarded up, department stores closed and restaurants and cafes shuttered. The Louvre, Eiffel Tower and the Paris Opera were closed.
Demonstrators left a trail of destruction on streets, with bank and insurance company offices’ windows smashed, cars and scooters set on fire and street furniture vandalised.
The Government has offered concessions to soothe protesters, scrapping next year’s fuel tax increases.
❛ The situation is now
under control