FOR the first time since massive regular protests began in January, the French government has held discussions with union leaders regarding the two year hike to the retirement age.
A notable problem with that long delay is that the age hike has already been forced into law via a decree by President Emmanuel Macron.
Public opinion is overwhelmingly against the change but the government is standing firm even though anger is rising to threatening levels nationwide. The first lady’s nephew was recently beaten by protesters over the age hike.
Over 60% of the country wants the Prime Minister fired and neither Macron nor his ministers can appear in public without protesters, noisily banging pots and pans.
‘Macron has destroyed our social services given huge tax gifts to the rich, persecuted and jailed protesters while allowing the far right to demonstrate without barely any police presence.’ say protesters.
‘People just want to live normally, but the Macron era is one of sadness and poverty.’
Unions say the country will not get back to normal unless the age hike is revoked. France has seen massive anti-government unrest regularly for well over a decade, and usually over far-right austerity measures.
The dissenters stress: ‘There is a growing realisation that our major national policies are decided in Brussels, and that our president is a mere puppet.
‘We’re also subservient to Washington. Simply look at what we’re doing in Ukraine for more proof.
‘So there’s no hope that we’ll have democracy during the last four years of Macron’s term. But if we don’t get it in 2027, things will explode.’
Police have again clashed with protesters in the French capital, Paris, amid a new round of rallies and strikes over Macron’s policies.
Union leaders walked out of a closed door meeting calling it ‘not useful’ and ‘a one way monologue’.
The pension age hike has overshadowed other crises, such as record inflation, the arming of the unrest in Ukraine and stagnant wages.
But all of those remain unresolved flashpoints. Barring a surprise reversal from the government, unions are planning 14 days of nationwide strikes next month.
- Less than two months after losing his home in an arson attack, the mayor of a town in western France resigned this week, citing, among other things, a ‘lack of support from the state’. Amid an increasingly tense political environment, attacks against mayors in France are multiplying. And some say they have been left to fend for themselves.
At the break of dawn on March 22, Mayor Yannick Morez of Saint-Brevin-les-Pins in western France woke up to find his house in flames.
‘We could have died,’ Morez wrote in the resignation letter he submitted last Tuesday. Neither he nor his family were injured, but the fire destroyed his home and two cars parked outside. It was a deliberate, targeted attack.
Almost two months later, the case is still being investigated. But Morez has already decided to seek a fresh start, with plans to leave the town he has called home for 32 years by the end of June.
President Macron expressed his solidarity with the mayor in a tweet a day after his resignation, calling the attacks ‘disgraceful’.
A former doctor, Morez had been mayor of Saint-Brevin, home to about 14,000 inhabitants, since 2017. In the months before the attack, the town had been wracked by right-wing protests against plans to move a local asylum accommodation centre close to a primary school.
Saint-Brevin has hosted migrants ever since the ‘Jungle’ camp near Calais on France’s north coast was dismantled in 2016.
‘We never had the slightest problem’ with migrants, Morez told a journalist in an interview a few days after the attack.
But protests organised by far-right groups were coupled with repeated threats directed at Morez, who had filed numerous complaints since January last year.
Amid an increasingly tense political environment, swelling support for right-wing ideologies and growing mistrust in institutions, French mayors say they are beginning to feel unsafe.
Morez detailed the reasons behind his resignation in a press release. ‘After a long period of reflection,’ he took the decision to quit not only citing ‘personal reasons’ linked to the arson attack but also mentioned a ‘lack of support from the state’.
The former mayor claims that little to no security measures were put in place to protect him and his family, despite repeated requests for help.
‘His feeling of abandonment can be understood in various ways,’ explained Bruno Cautrès, political researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). Though local officials came forward to express their support, the mayor feels there were no visible, concrete steps taken to support him.
‘It’s true that people nationwide only found out the mayor was facing threats after he quit,’ Cautrès said.
The government disagrees. State secretary for rural affairs Dominique Faure insisted the French state took concrete steps to support Morez.
‘I can’t let this slide,’ she tweeted, before listing ways in which the state supported him. ‘(We set up) regular police checks outside his house, registered his home so authorities could intervene (in the case of an incident) and provided security during the protests against the asylum centre.’
But according to an article in the daily ‘Libération’, most of the security measures were taken only after Morez’s house was burned down.
After sounding the alarm with local officials back in January 2022 over the ‘daily acts of intimidation’ he was facing, Morez eventually brought the issue to the attention of the Nantes prosecutor in February 2023, asking for a personal security detail to protect him and his family. He received a response saying authorities were still evaluating the risks to see if a security detail was necessary. Less than two weeks later, Morez had resigned.
The establishment of migrant welcome centres is part of a nationwide government policy overseen by the prime minister and minister of interior. But Morez ‘felt he was left on his own when issues arose linked to accommodating the asylum-seekers’ Cautrès said.
‘He would undoubtedly have liked the government to do a better job explaining (the policy) and guiding him through the process,’ Cautrès said. ‘They could have worked with him, to raise awareness on the issue locally and appease the worries of inhabitants.’
The threat posed by opponents of the asylum centre could also have been flagged earlier on.
After repeated demonstrations in Saint-Brevin organised by the far-right Reconquête (Reconquest) party, led by former presidential candidate Éric Zemmour, ‘I find it hard to imagine that police didn’t know who was a potential threat,’ Cautrès said. ‘The mayor probably felt that the gendarmerie could have intervened before things escalated the way they did.’
The lack of support Morez felt is a sentiment shared by many mayors across France, who are becoming frequent targets of abuse and attacks.
A November 2022 survey published by the Centre for Political Research at Sciences Po university in Paris and the Association of French Mayors found that 53 per cent of mayors had experienced ‘incivility’ (rudeness or aggression) in 2020; by 2022, 63 per cent had experienced such harassment.
In a country where over half of all municipalities have fewer than 500 inhabitants, it’s easy to know where the mayor lives. They are very often in close contact with their communities. While attacks on other elected officials like MPs have also become more frequent, mayors are the ‘most exposed’, according to Cautrès.
But unlike the arson attack against Morez in Saint-Brevin, mayors are most worried about violence that doesn’t have an ideology. ‘Cases linked to everyday life’ are more concerning, Cautrès explained. ‘Like receiving a threatening letter because an inhabitant was sanctioned for having a fire in their garden.’
The mayors’ association told French newspaper ‘Le Parisien’ that there were around 1,500 reported assaults on municipal officials in 2022, a 15 per cent increase from the year before. Half of these attacks were insults, 40 per cent were threats and 10 per cent were ‘deliberate violence’.
According to the association, 150 mayors were physically targeted as a result of local or ideological tensions.
Both Cautrès and the mayors’ association explain the rise in attacks by citing persistent tensions in French society, which has in recent years experienced multiple crises including the Yellow Vests movement, Covid-19, inflation and the hotly contested pension reforms.
‘Meanwhile, in southern France, elected officials are taking the reins. Some 2,000 mayors in the Occitania region gathered in Montpellier last Tuesday to share their worries about the growing violence against them.
‘Mayors feel that they are being asked to solve everything themselves,’ Cautrès said of the meeting. ‘But they can’t.’
