ON SATURDAY Yellow Vest protesters marched in cities across France for the 25th straight week, with 18,900 protesters taking part.
Dozens demonstrated at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport to denounce privatisation plans.
Demonstrations were also held in cities around France, including Nice and Marseille, the Alpine town of Chambery and in Lyon, with clashes between protesters and police in Lyon.
Police also fired tear gas in La Roche-sur-Yon, where protests in the town centre had been banned.
The latest demonstrations came as a group of more than 50 actors, writers, musicians and filmmakers, including actress Juliette Binoche, published a letter on the website of French newspaper Liberation in support of the Yellow Vest movement.
Titled ‘Yellow Vests: we are not fooled!’ the letter said the group could see the government’s efforts to discredit the Yellow Vest protesters and their attempts to make them out to be ‘anti-ecologists, extremists, racists, thieves.
‘This tactic does not work, this story does not match reality, even if the mainstream media and government spokesmen would like us to believe it,’ they wrote.
‘Like the violence they highlight every Saturday, yet the most alarming violence is not there.
‘The toll of repression is getting worse every week,’ the letter went on to say, adding that as of April 19, there had been a number of deaths, 248 head injuries, 23 severe eye injuries and five hands badly injured among the demonstrators.
‘How can we still exercise our right to demonstrate in the face of such repression?’ they asked.
‘We are not fooled! The most threatening violence is economic and social. It is the one of this government that defends the interests of a few at the expense of all,’ the letter continued.
