France celebrates this Tuesday the tenth day of unemployment and protests against Emmanuel Macron’s pension reform, which has the country against it, and in which the Government faces a challenge: prevent violence from spilling over. In the last week and a half, but especially last Thursday, the protests have ended with riots, hundreds of arrests, injuries and clashes between protesters and agents.
The equation that Macron is trying to solve is difficult: calming public anger at its peak without withdrawing the reform, which is the origin of the crisis. And avoid chaos in the street, increasingly enraged and in the midst of criticism of the actions of the forces of order. In recent days, reports of police violence have multiplied. On Saturday, an environmental protest ended in a confrontation between police and protesters. There are two in a coma.
President Macron met yesterday with his Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, some members of his government and the leaders of the groups that support him in Parliament (in addition to Renaissance, his party, Horizons and Modem), to design a strategy to face to today’s mobilization, but also on a political level, since the Government is increasingly alone in the Assembly and fears that it will not be able to approve the following laws that it has in its portfolio, such as the one on immigration.
The Executive has tried to calm things down by reaching out to the unions, although it seems unlikely that this option will prosper, given that both Macron and Borne have warned that they will talk about everything except the reform. Borne wants to win new support in the Chamber, to avoid a political blockade and to be able to move forward with the following laws in the pipeline, such as Immigration.
“At the moment there is no end in sight to the crisis, because the president has excluded the best solution, which is to find a political balance. The Government has chosen, on the contrary, the path of trying to tire the protesters and hope that the protest exhausts itself, because a situation like this does not last forever,” explains Sebastian Roche, a researcher at the University of Grenoble and an expert in police violence, to EL MUNDO.
“There are very important risks of public disorder facing today,” Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said at a press conference to announce the security device. Between 650,000 and 900,000 protesters are expected throughout the country, between 70,000 and 100,000 in Paris, with an unprecedented security device: 13,000 agents, 5,500 in the capital.
“There is a very powerful national movement of anger, with strong sources of tension that already go beyond the reform. The Government has reduced the movement to a confrontation. The strategy of order that it seeks, the solution to this, goes through compromise political, not by putting more police on the streets,” says Roche.
“Since March 16, the forces of order have faced acts of extreme violence,” carried out by “extreme left radicals, who seek to injure and even kill the police,” denounced Darmanin, who has assured that many come from abroad. : “They are not protesting the pension reform, but are seeking to destabilize the institutions”. The minister counted more than 800 officers injured in the last week and a half, more than 2,000 fires and numerous acts of vandalism against public buildings or institutions.
The Government defends itself against criticism by assuring that there is a new profile of radicals that has slipped into the protests and the agents are victims of attacks. “There is a change in their nature, with radicalized individuals who were not in the first days of protests,” said the head of the General Inspectorate of the National Police (IGPN), which is studying some twenty complaints filed.
This is already the third month of the national mobilization against the pension reform. It began at the end of January, when the law was approved, with peaceful demonstrations and strikes. The fuse on the street was lit a week and a half ago, when Macron decided to approve the law by decree, skipping the parliamentary vote.
This spread public anger, as the French see this as a blow to democracy. The reform is opposed by seven out of 10 French and almost the entire parliamentary arc. The law is currently in the hands of the Constitutional Council, which must assess whether, as the opposition and unions denounce, the procedure used to approve it is unconstitutional.
In addition to the demonstrations, transport blockades, flight cancellations and strikes at refineries were expected today. On Monday the Louvre Museum and several institutes were blocked and the garbage strike in Paris is in its third week, although some of the garbage has been removed to prevent protesters from burning it, as has happened in the last week.
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