PARIS: Hundreds of thousands protested across France on Thursday in a show of anger over President Emmanuel Macron’s austerity policies, disrupting much of the country’s public life.
Heeding a call from trade unions, protesters staged a day of nationwide actions, with public transport stalled, schools closed and people taking to the streets for demonstrations marked by sporadic clashes with the police.
One trade union, the leftist CGT, said that more than a million people across the country had taken part in the demonstrations.
French authorities, whose count is usually substantially lower than that of unions, said more than 500,000 people had demonstrated in the country, including 55,000 in Paris.
Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu, Macron’s seventh head of government since 2017, vowed a break from the past in a bid to defuse a deepening political crisis after taking office last week.
But the appointment of the 39-year-old former defence minister and close Macron ally has failed to calm the anger of unions and many French people.
Many protesters took direct aim at Macron, who has just 18 months left in power and is enduring his worst-ever popularity levels.
Some placards urged him to resign, and demonstrators in the southern city of Nice threw an effigy of Macron into the air.
Sophie Larchet, a 60-year-old civil servant, said she came to protest in Paris because of Macron.
“We’ve had enough, he’s tormenting France,” she told AFP.
Herve Renard, a 57-year-old union activist, referring to France’s former emperor, said: “Macron-Napoleon is listening to no one.”
Many complained about a growing gap between ordinary people and elites, saying a series of austerity measures proposed by the government would hit the poorest hardest.
“Every day the richest get richer and the poor get poorer,” Bruno Cavalier, 64, said in Lyon, France’s third-largest city. He carried a placard reading “Smile, you are being taxed.”
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