‘Anger is growing’: protests and strikes spread across France over pensions reform
Renaud, 49, leaned out of the window of his Paris bin lorry, which was being held in its depot by a barricade of strikers. “Emmanuel Macron doesn’t seem to be listening to the anger out there,” he said. “People don’t think we’re in a democracy any more.”
A refuse-truck driver for 22 years, Renaud had watched as his garbage processing plant was blocked for the 15th day of a rubbish-collection strike that has all but submerged the French capital under 10,000 tonnes of waste. He couldn’t afford to strike and risk losing his daily income but understood the rage over Macron’s decision to use executive powers to push through an unpopular rise in the French pension age to 64 without a vote in parliament.
Everyone was talking about how the political system was collapsing, he said. “People are struggling, prices are going up. I already have to work extra jobs to make ends meet — carpentry, building, anything I can find.”
Protests intensified in France on Tuesday after the government narrowly survived a no-confidence vote. Over several nights of sporadic demonstrations there have been more than 1,500 protests in cities including Marseille, Lyon, Lille and Paris – where bins were set alight — as well as ring-road blockades, docker protests, barricaded university buildings, train-track invasions at stations, refinery protests and electricity blackouts by strikers. At Renaud’s depot, a crowd of students gathered to support the strikers.
“Everyone’s joining in, the government is afraid of more and more young people taking part,” said Céline, 53, a trade unionist for the leftwing CGT union who works in local government administration in Ivry, a Communist-run town on the south-eastern edge of Paris and has been on the barricades at the trash plant since 5am most mornings.
“There has been a denial of democracy,” she said. “Macron thinks of himself as a kind of king, Jupiter up high looking down on us. We’ve got to hold out until he listens.”
