On Saturday, France had one of its worst days of street disorder in decades. Depending on who you ask, somewhere between 550,000 and 800,000 people marched in cities across the country — against rising fuel prices, the cost of living, and public services that keep getting worse.
Most of them marched peacefully. But as the day wore on, a violent fringe turned it into something ugly: masked groups smashing shop windows, torching cars, and looting stores in Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Nice, Lille, Nantes, Bordeaux, Toulouse and Strasbourg. Police answered with tear gas, stun grenades and water cannons, and the numbers now being reported are grim — somewhere between 1,200 and 2,400 arrested, hundreds of police officers injured, and one demonstrator dead in Paris after a cardiac arrest.
The worst single image of the day comes from Limoges, in central France. Protesters first set fire to a police car outside the town hall, then broke into the building and set it on fire. The 143-year-old building, built in 1883, is now “largely lost” — its roof collapsed, its clock tower down. A local official called it a “catastrophe for heritage.” The city halls of Marseille and Lille were also broken into and vandalized, and a tourist office was torched in Lyon.
What makes this one interesting to me is how it started. Weeks ago, it was high-school students protesting teacher shortages and packed classrooms. Then the CGT union and yellow-vest supporters joined in, and fuel prices and the cost of living got added to the demands. A school protest turned into a national one.
On Sunday, Emmanuel Macron addressed the country and called for calm. He said “nothing justifies” the violence, but he also drew a line between the peaceful protesters — whose grievances he called legitimate — and the people he called “sowers of chaos.” Far-right leader Marine Le Pen and hard-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon both called for calm too. And this is all happening less than a year before France’s presidential election, so the politics of it are impossible to ignore.
This is not just France, either. Smaller cost-of-living protests were held the same day in Belgium, Italy and Portugal. An EU law professor told Al Jazeera that France is the epicentre but the movement is spreading beyond its borders.
My honest take: I have two feelings about this, and I will be straight about both. First, burning a 143-year-old town hall does not lower the price of bread. The shops that got looted, the workers, the taxpayers who will pay for the rebuild — they are all worse off, not better. Violence like this hands the government an excuse to stop listening.
But here is the other side, and it matters just as much: 550,000-plus people do not walk out on a Saturday because everything is fine. The cost of living is not a side issue — it is THE issue, in France and pretty much everywhere else I look, including Canada. When politicians treat it as background noise, the street eventually becomes the loudest voice in the room. Elections are won and lost on exactly this, and any leader who ignores that is asking for trouble.
Source: Views Bangladesh reporting
0 Comments