Travel misery as French trade unions strike against Macron
SHOWDOWN: Seven unions representing staff in the public sector had called for strikes
PARIS: Tens of thousands of protesters rallied in the streets of France on Thursday and strikes caused travel misery for millions in a showdown between trade unions and President Emmanuel Macron that could be decisive for his reform efforts.
Seven unions representing staff in the public sector had called for strikes and protests on Thursday, while a third of railway workers walked out to join the demonstrations against 40-year-old Macron’s bid to shake up the French state.
The strikes meant that less than half of the country’s high-speed TGV trains were running, while flights, schools, daycare centres, libraries and other public services such as garbage collection were disturbed to varying degrees.
Police fired teargas and water cannon in central Paris during sporadic clashes between security forces and groups of students which appeared to have been infiltrated by far-left anarchists.
At least one office window was smashed, police said, and a car had been set on fire.
But while commuters faced problems in some areas, particularly in the suburbs of Paris, and many parents were forced to find last-minute childcare solutions, the turnout at the protests and the severity of the strikes appeared low by standards.
“The real question for today is how many people are going to join the action?” hard-left leader Jean-luc Melenchon told reporters in Paris as he arrived with other leftist political leaders, including the incoming head of the Socialist party Olivier Faure.
March 22 had been chosen deliberately to echo the start of student protests in 1968 that led to a crippling historic French strike that paralysed the country in May of that year. On Thursday, protests in major cities such as Marseille and Lyon saw around 10,000 people and rail unions claimed around 25,000 took part in Paris, but the numbers were smaller than previous demonstrations against labour reforms rammed through by Macron last year.
The centrist leader was reported to have told advisers in private this week that he was feeling “serene” as Thursday approached, adding that the day of strikes was “not a cause for panic”, according to the investigative newspaper Le Canard Enchaine.
Public opinion is largely behind his bid to remove some of the pension privileges and job guarantees for new employees hired by the railways, while his bid to shake-up the civil service and education system were announced during his election campaign last year.