That’s why the French know no mercy

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Whether it’s higher fuel prices, minimum wages or, as is the case now, pension reforms and climate protection – when the anger of the people in France flares up, the same images of violence always follow: angry crowds marching through the inner cities with torches. They put up blockades on main traffic arteries, in front of airports and train stations.

Garbage cans and tires burn. Sometimes entire cars are on fire. Shop windows are smashed, emergency services attacked, public and private buildings broken into. In Paris, demonstrators stormed the building of exchange operator Euronext and the headquarters of Louis Vuitton. Employees forcibly entered the offices of the state railway company SNCF in Lyon. In Rennes, a police station was even occupied and set on fire.

Climate activists close Autobahn

While climate activists in Switzerland glue their hands to the asphalt with superglue, for example to disrupt Zurich’s commute, their French like-minded people are building a shoulder-high brick wall on the A69 in the southwest of the country. Reason: protest against the planned construction of a new stretch of highway between Toulouse and Castres.

Since mid-March, there have been repeated riots in Paris and other cities. The protests are directed against the pension reform implemented by decree by President Emmanuel Macron (45). According to this, the French can no longer retire at 62, but only at 64. Not just a few militants, but millions followed the call of the eight major trade unions to resist. Aspiring retirees marched next to students, workers next to housewives.

After three weeks of violent protests, France is licking its wounds: more than 1,000 police and firefighters were injured, 2,500 fires started and more than 300 public buildings were damaged.

“Liberté Ègalité Fraternité” still applies

Other governments are also struggling with mass demonstrations. But in hardly any other country are protests and strikes as frequent, violent and persistent as in France. For example, a study by the Cologne Institute for Economic Research (IW) found that between 2007 and 2016 there were an average of 123 strike days per year for every 1,000 French workers. In Switzerland it was two days.

For German political scientist Johannes Maria Becker (70), the culture of protest is in France’s cultural DNA. “The French view of the resistance is based on the revolutionary history of the country,” the conflict researcher at the University of Marburg explains to Blick.

Because with uprisings, the population has achieved important successes. Becker: “They celebrate revolutions there. July 14, the day of the storming of the Bastille in 1789, is the most important national holiday in France.” The scientist also sees a reason for the violence in the French police: “The agents are not trained for de-escalation as in, for example, Germany”.

Emmanuel Macron, against whom the anger of the people is directed, must dress warmly. The newly elected general secretary of the French trade union federation Confédération générale du travail (CGT), Sophie Binet (41), announces: “May 1 will be an unprecedented day of mobilization”.

Source: Blick