France

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Re: France

Post by blindpig » Thu Apr 13, 2023 2:23 pm

Class Struggle in France: How to Escape the Counterrevolution
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on APRIL 12, 2023
Maurizio Lazzarato

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What links exist between the strikes in France and the war? An overview from the perspective of class struggle and an urgent call to reconstitute strategic thinking.

Let’s get straight to the point: after the huge demonstrations against pension “reform”, the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, decided to “pass it by force” (passer en force), depriving Parliament of its power and imposing the sovereign decision to pass the law raising the retirement age from 62 to 64. At the demonstrations, the immediate response was “we also pass by force”. Between opposing wills, the sovereign will of the State-capital machine and the will of the class, force decides. The capital-labor compromise has been broken since the seventies, but the financial crisis and the war further radicalized the conditions of confrontation.

Let us analyze the two poles of this power relation founded on force in the political conditions opened between 2008 and 2022.

The French March

The movement seems to have grasped the change of political phase provoked first by the financial crisis of 2008 and then by the war. It has used many of the forms of struggle that the French proletariat developed in recent years, keeping it united, articulating and legitimizing its differences. The trade union struggles, with their peaceful marches which progressively changed and integrated non-wage components (on March 23 the presence of youth, university and high school students was massive), were joined by the “wildcat” demonstrations which for days took place at nightfall in the streets of the capital and other big cities (where they were even more intense).

This strategy of action, developed by groups constantly moving from one part of the city to another, confronting the police, is a clear inheritance of the forms of struggle of the “yellow vests” which began to “terrorize” the bourgeoisie, when instead of parading calmly between Republique and Nation, they “set fire” to the rich neighborhoods of western Paris. On the night of the 23rd, 923 fire outbreaks (“departs de feu”) were counted in Paris alone. The police declared that the “wild” nights involved a higher level of “raids” in relation to those carried out against the yellow vests.

No trade union, not even the most pro-presidential (CFDT) condemned the “wild” demonstrations. Without exception, the media, all owned by oligarchs, who were eagerly awaiting, after the first “violent acts”, a turnaround of public opinion, were disappointed: two thirds of the French people still supported the revolt. The “sovereign” had refused to receive the unions, showing his desire for direct confrontation, without mediation. Everyone had deduced that there was only one possible strategy to adopt: the articulation of different forms of struggle, without being ashamed of the distinction between “violence” and “pacifism”.

The massification and differentiation of the components present in the protests are also to be found in the picket lines, which are as important, if not more so, than the demonstrations. Macron’s decision was probably motivated, above all, by the blockade, not entirely successful, of the general strike of March 7 (on the 8th the situation had become almost normal!). But what Macron did not foresee was the acceleration produced in the movement by the decision to apply Article 49.3. of the French Constitution, which forced the approval of the pension reform bill, without going through the vote of the deputies.

The only movement which was not integrated into the struggle is that of the revolt of the banlieues. The conjunction between “petits blancs” (the poorest parties of the white proletariat) and “les barabares” (the French children of immigrants, the “natives of the republic”) did not take place this time either. This is not insignificant, as we shall see later, because here the possible world revolution, the North/South conjunction, is at stake.

There was a de facto and universally accepted articulation between the mass struggles and the struggles of a minority part which has dedicated itself to prolonging the conflict at night by using the poubelles (garbage) – accumulated on the sides of the streets due to the street sweepers’ strike – to block the police and provoke zbeuls (disorder). For the moment, let’s call it ‘vanguard’ because I don’t know what else to call it, hoping that the usual cretins won’t cry Leninism. It is not a question of bringing consciousness to the proletariat, which would lack it, nor of political leadership functions, but of articulating the struggle in the face of the iron arm imposed by the established power. The relation masses/active minorities is present in all revolutionary movements. It is a question of rethinking it in the new conditions, not of eliminating it.

“Everyone had deduced that there was only one possible strategy to adopt: the articulation of different forms of struggle, without being ashamed of the distinction between “violence” and “pacifism”.”

Before the great mobilizations of recent days, there were differences and divisions running through the French proletariat, weakening its shock force. Here we can only summarize them: the unions and the institutional parties of the left (with the exception of France Insoumise) never understood the movement of the yellow vests, neither its nature, nor the demands of those workers who do not fit the classic standards of the wage-earner. They have shown indifference, if not hostility, towards their struggles. On the other hand, they have expressed open enmity towards the “barbarians” of the banlieues (with the exception of France Insoumise), joined by a part of the feminist movement, when they were all victims of the racist campaigns launched by the power and the media against the “Islamic veil”. For their part, neither the former nor the latter have been able to develop autonomous and independent forms of organization capable of contributing their point of view, which neither the trade unions nor the parties, closed on a constantly shrinking basis, even want to consider. Within the “barbarians” a decolonial theory has developed, many of whose positions can be shared, but which has never managed to take root in the barrios and endow itself with a mass organization. The feminist movement, for its part, is well organized and has developed lucid and profound analyses, expressing radical positions, but it brings no political ruptures of magnitude. It does not engage in a political battle within the struggles underway, although women are undoubtedly the most affected by the “reforms”.

Thus, the French proletariat was fragmented by racism, sexism and new forms of precarious work

The current movement made “bouger les lignes”, as the French say, as it shifted the dividing lines, partially recomposing the distinctions. The ecological actions also found strength and resources within the struggles. The Sainte-Soline clashes against the construction of large reservoirs to collect water for the agri-food industry, in which the police used military weapons, aroused indignation and mobilization in the days that followed, with the resumption of “wild” demonstrations, albeit on a smaller scale.

A leap in the recomposition? Perhaps it is too early to say. In any case, the various movements that have traversed France in recent years inserted themselves into the union mobilization, endowing it with a different image and substance: that of defiance of power and capital. In two months they burned Macron and brought his presidency to a dead end.

When the political system of Western countries becomes oligarchic and when consensus can no longer be secured through wages, rents and consumption, which are continually blocked or cut, the police become the fundamental axis of “governance”. Macron has managed the social struggles of his presidency centrally through the police.

“The brutality of interventions is today at the heart of the French ‘law and order’ strategy. France not only has a great revolutionary tradition, but it also has a tradition of exercising counter-revolutionary violence, unheard of in the colonies and proportional to the danger that power faces in the metropolis (where it does not hesitate to have the colonial army intervene, as in 1848, to repress the revolution). What is at stake now in the movement is not reducible to labor and its rejection, but rather the future of capitalism itself and its State, as is always the case when wars break out between imperialisms.

The lesson we can draw from two months of struggle is the urgency of rethinking and reconfiguring the question of force, of its organization, of its use. Tactics and strategy are once again political necessities of which the movements have been little concerned, focusing almost exclusively on the specificity of their power relations (sexist, racist, ecological, wage). And yet they raised the level of confrontation by moving objectively together, in the absence of subjective coordination, destructuring the constituted power.

Either the problem of the rupture with capitalism, with all that it implies, is reinstated, or we will continue to act only on the defensive. What arises when the war between imperialisms is imposed is always, historically, the possibility of its “collapse” (from which can also emerge a new division of power in the world market and a new cycle of accumulation). The United States, China and Russia are fully aware of what is at stake. Whether the class struggle can reach this level of confrontation is still an unknown.

Western autocracy

The French Constitution has always foreseen the possibility for the “sovereign” to decide within the so-called democratic institutions, thus the invention of article 49.3, which allows legislating without going through parliament. It is the inscription in the Constitution of the continuity of the processes of political centralization that began long before the birth of capitalism. The centralization of military force (the legitimate monopoly of its exercise), also prior to capitalism, constitutes the other indispensable condition for the emergence of the State-capital machine, which in turn will immediately proceed to centralize economic force, forming monopolies and oligopolies that have only increased in size and economic and political weight throughout the history of capitalism.

Much of political thought has ignored actually” existing capitalism, eliminating its processes of “sovereign” centralization; thus paving the way for the concepts of “governance”, “governmentality” (Foucault) or “government” (Agamben, much agitated during the pandemic, but disappeared with the -very little biopolitical- war between imperialisms).

Foucault’s statements in this regard are significant of the theoretical climate of the counter-revolution: “The economy is a discipline without totality, the economy is a discipline that begins to manifest not only the uselessness, but the impossibility of a sovereign point of view”. The monopolies are the “sovereigns” of the economy which will only increase their will of totalization, combining with the “sovereign” power of the political system and the “sovereign” power of the army and the police.

Capitalism is not identical to liberalism or neo-liberalism. Both are radically different and it makes no sense to describe the development of the state-capital machine as the passage from sovereign societies to disciplinary societies and the society of control. The three centralizations complement and command each other always and in any case as forms of governmentality (liberal or neoliberal), using them and then abandoning them, when the class confrontation becomes radicalized.The enormous imbalances and polarizations between States and between classes provoked by centralization lead directly to war, which expresses once again the truth of capitalism (the confrontation between imperialisms), the political repercussions of which are immediate, especially in the small European States. While the French president is asserting his sovereignty before his “population”, he has lost, like a good vassal, a piece of it to the United States, which has replaced – thanks to the war against Russia – the Franco-German axis by that of the United States-Great Britain-Eastern countries; in the center of which, the Americans have installed the most reactionary, sexist, clerical, homophobic, anti-worker and warmongering of the European countries: Poland. At this point, not only the federal hypothesis is a utopia, but also the Europe of nations. The future will be one of nationalism and new fascism. If anyone ever wanted to resurrect the European project, after a new slavish consent to the logic of dollar imperialism, he would first have to undertake a struggle for liberation from Yankee colonialism.

On the international chessboard, even less than before the war, but like all marginal lords, Macron pours all his lividity and impotence on his “subjects”, upon whom he bestows police action.

According to the Financial Times of March 25, 2023, “France has a regime that, among developed countries, most closely resembles an autocratic dictatorship.” It is amusing to read the international press of capital being alarmed (Wall Street Journal) that “Macron’s forced march to transform the French economy into a business-friendly environment comes at the expense of social cohesion.” Their real concern is not the living conditions of millions of proletarians, but the “populist” danger that would threaten the Atlantic Alliance, global NATO and thus the ruling United States: the “parliamentary rebellion” and “the chaos unfolding across the country raise troubling questions for the nation’s future for all those who expect France to remain firmly in the liberal, pro-European Union, pro-NATO camp.” The Financial Times fears that France “will follow the Americans, British and Italians and opt for the populist vote.” It is not clear whether they are hypocritical or irresponsible. They would like to have both at the same time: financial income/monopoly rent and social cohesion, democracy and dictatorship of capital, tax-exempt companies, lavishly financed by a Welfare completely twisted in their favor and social peace. Der Spiegel speaks of “democratic deficit”, of “democracy itself in danger”, when it is the economic policies that daily defend the causes of the Western autocracy that has nothing, but to envy to the Eastern one.

The cycle of the global struggle after 2011

What is just beginning to be glimpsed in the struggles in France, the challenge to power and capital, is what the struggles in the global South achieved since 2011. Back in the 20th century, the global South played a decisive strategic role, even more so than the struggles in the West. The international dimension of power relations is a decisive knot for regaining the initiative. The crisis of 2008 not only opened up the possibility of war (which came with punctuality), but also the possibility of revolutionary ruptures (the reality of struggles moves, it is obliged to move in this direction if it does not want to be swept away by the joint action of war and the new fascisms).

The last globalization not only deepened the differences between North and South, but also created Northerners in the South and implanted Southerners in the North. This in no way implies a homogeneity of political behavior and processes of subjectivation between the two hemispheres. The center-periphery polarization is immanent to capitalism and must imperatively and continuously reproduce itself. Without the depredation of the “South”, without the imposition of “lumpen” development and “unequal exchange” (Samir Amin), the rate of profit is bound to fall inexorably, despite all the innovations, technologies and inventions that the North can produce under the control of the biggest techno-scientific entrepreneur: the Pentagon. This is the underlying reason for the current war. The great South wants to get out of this relationship of subordination – it has even already partially gotten out of it – and it is this political will that threatens U.S. financial and monetary hegemony and its productive and political supremacy.

There are at least two major political differences that remain between the West and the rest of the world. The non-integration of the “barbarians” of the French suburbs in the current struggles, despite the fact that they constitute one of the poorest and most exploited layers of the French proletariat is already a symptom, within the Western countries, of the difficulties in overcoming the “colonial divide” from which the whites have long benefited.

Within the cycle of struggles initiated in 2011 there was a differentiation similar to that produced in the 20th century. Then we had socialist or national liberation revolutions (with socialist overtones) throughout the great South and mass struggles, some very hard fought, but unable to lead to successful revolutionary processes in the West. Today we have big strikes in Europe (in France, Great Britain, Spain and even in Germany) and, on the other hand, real uprisings, insurrections and opening of revolutionary processes in the great South. Let us consider just a few examples – Egypt/Tunisia inaugurating the cycle in 2011, Chile and Iran more recently – to highlight the differences and possible convergences.

It is difficult to compare the Arab Spring uprising with “Occupy Wall Street”, even if there was a circulation of forms of struggle: removal of the constituted power, millions of people mobilized, political systems shaken to their foundations, repression with hundreds of deaths, possibility of opening a true revolutionary process, which was immediately aborted because, as a poster in Cairo read during the uprising, “Half revolution, no revolution”. Occupy Wall Street never put into play power relations of this magnitude, nor did it generate, even if only for brief periods, “vacuums”, de-structuring, delegitimization of the devices of power such as those that periodically determine the uprisings in the South. And it is still the South that opens and promotes new cycles of struggle (see also South American feminism) that are reproduced with less intensity and force in the North. That of Chile, where “neoliberalism” was born after the action of the State-capital machine physically destroyed the revolutionary processes underway and called Hayek and Friedman to build, on the massacre, the market, competition and human capital (never confuse neoliberalism with imperialism or capitalism, one must always distinguish them, carefully!), is another type of insurrection, from which other lessons can be drawn, even if, as in North Africa, they are political defeats.

In Chile, unlike Egypt, a multiplicity of movements (the importance of the feminist and indigenous movement is significant) expressed themselves in revolt. But at a certain moment in the class struggle, one is confronted with a power that is no longer only patriarchal or heterosexual power, no longer only racist power, no longer only the power of the master, but the general power of the State-capital machine that encompasses them, reorganizes them and, at the same time, overflows them. Nor is the enemy only the national power, the sovereignty of a State like that of Chile. In these situations we are directly confronted with imperialist policies because any rupture – as in Egypt (more than in Tunisia) or in Chile or Iran – runs the risk of calling into question the relations of force in the world market, the global organization of power: both the Chilean and the Egyptian insurrection were closely followed by the United States, which did not hesitate to intervene with its “strategic interference”. In France a similar situation exists: the development of the struggles encounters, starting from a “trade union” struggle, the totality of the State-capital machine.

In these moments of struggle a point of no return is reached for both contenders, because it is not possible to consolidate stable forms of counter-power, of “liberated” spaces or territories, only for short periods of time. The Zapatista solution is neither generalizable nor reproducible (as the Zapatistas themselves have always affirmed). It is not understood how a lasting “dual power” can be implemented under the current conditions of capitalism. At the same time, since 1968, the seizure of power does not seem a priority. The current situation is configured like a puzzle! Despite the political differences between the North and the South, transversal problems arise: what political subject to build that is capable, at the same time, of organizing the multiplicity of forms of struggle and points of view and of posing the question of the dualism of power and the organization of force.

The revolts, the insurrections (but also, albeit in a different way, the struggles in France), produce a series of enigmas or impossibilities: impossibility of totalizing and synthesizing the struggles and impossibility of remaining in dispersion and difference; impossibility of not rebelling by de-structuring power and impossibility of taking power; impossibility of organizing the passage from multiplicity to the dualism of power imposed by the enemy and impossibility of remaining solely in multiplicity and difference; impossibility of centralization and impossibility of confronting the enemy without centralization. To fight against these impossibilities is the condition to create the possible revolution. Only under these conditions, solving these enigmas, overcoming these impossibilities, the impossibility of revolution becomes possible.

The second great difference between the North and the South concerns the ongoing war and imperialism. Imperialism names the leap in the quality of capital that operates from the integration of three processes of centralization (economic, political and military) that the First World War consecrates and that reached its climax during “neo-liberalism”. Far from free competition and free enterprise, alien to any struggle against the concentration of power that distorts competition, dissatisfied with the predation operated on a world scale and with the imposition of a reorganization in its favor of Welfare, imperialist centralization allows imposing – as it is doing – the inflation of its profits (“pricing power”: the power to fix the price in defiance of the self-styled neo-liberalism).

The French movement has not expressed itself on the war between imperialisms. The struggle against pension reform falls within this framework, even if the question has never been raised, even if the fact that Europe is at war and the West is recalibrating from Welfare to Warfare changes the political situation considerably. Perhaps it is better this way, even if it is an obvious political constraint. Had it done so, different, even opposing, political positions would probably have emerged. In the global South, on the other hand, the verdict on the war is clear and unanimous: it is a war between imperialisms whose origin is US imperialism, to which the suicidal European political classes adhere. The South is divided between states that declare themselves neutral and others that side with Russia, but all reject sanctions and arms supplies.

In the South, the category of imperialism has never been questioned as in the West. The blunder committed by Toni Negri and Michael Hardt in Empire – a supranational formation that has never been formed – shows a notorious difference in analysis and political sensitivity, to the point that they went so far as to affirm, in the last volume of their trilogy, that after having tried war, the impossible Empire would have opted for finance. That is exactly the opposite of what happened: American finance, after having produced and continuing to produce repeated crises – which constantly bring capitalism to the brink of collapse – is saved, exclusively, by the intervention of the sovereignty of the States and, in the first place, by that of the United States, which ends up being forced into war. Contemporary imperialism, the concept of which could be summed up – by greatly simplifying it – in the triangle monopoly/currency/war, also sheds light on the limits of the theories that have ignored it and obliges us to adopt the point of view of the South, which has never abandoned it because it still has it on its shoulders. As we have it too, but we prefer to pretend we don’t!

How to escape from the counterrevolution?

The struggles of the French proletariat are admirable. They are exciting because in them we recognize traits of the revolutions of the 19th century (and even of the great revolution), which confront counterrevolution with a continuity and an intensity not seen in any other Western country. However, it is necessary to remain vigilant. If the French proletarians rise up with an impressive regularity against the “reforms”, so far they have only succeeded in delaying their application or in modifying them marginally, producing and sedimenting, on the other hand, unprecedented processes of subjectivation which accumulate as in the current struggles (from the struggles against the labor law of the yellow vests to the Zones of Defense, the ZADs). All the struggles have been, at least up to now, defensive, whose reactive sense can certainly be overcome, but there remains a considerable starting handicap.

To explain what we call “defeat” – in spite of the great resistance expressed – perhaps we must go back to how wage, social and political conquests were imposed. If in the 19th century the first victories were the result of the struggles of the European working classes, in the 20th century the South played an increasingly important strategic role. It was the revolutions – as a latent threat in the North and as victorious in the South – that jammed the State-capital machine, forcing it to make concessions. What was frightening was the autonomy and independence of the proletarian point of view expressed there. The union of the peasant revolutions in the South with the workers’ struggles in the North led to an objective front of struggles across the “color line” that forced wage increases, welfare policies in the North and the breaking of the colonial division that had reigned for four centuries in the great South. This is the most important fruit of the Soviet revolution (Lenin never went to London, nor to Detroit, but was seen in Peking, Hanoi, Algiers, etc.), which was prolonged by the “oppressed peoples”.

Just as socialism is impossible in a single country, it is also impossible to impose conditions on the State-capital machine from a single nation.The Western working classes were defeated with the advent of World War I, when the overwhelming majority of the labor movement agreed to send the working classes to the slaughter for the glory of their respective national bourgeoisies. By the time the labor and class movement had redeemed itself through anti-fascism, the initiative was in the hands of the “peasant” revolutions, whose force pushed the centers of capitalism eastward. By then, the Western working classes had been integrated into the development and even when they revolted they were never able to really threaten the capital-state machine. In the same period, the revolutions of the great South were transformed into production machines or nation-states.

With the disappearance of the threat of revolution in the North and its real presence in the South, the relationship of forces was radically inverted: we began to lose and continue to lose, piece by piece, all that we had conquered (the passage from 60 to 67 years -that is, seven years of life captured at a stroke by capital- is perhaps the clearest sign of defeat). Until the counterrevolution initiated in the seventies, even when it had been politically defeated, progress was made in the social and economic fields. Today it is losing on both fronts. Now, after the crisis of 2008, significant struggles are breaking out everywhere (the French March is one of them), but unless the network of insurrections and struggles on a global scale is retracted, subjectively, this time I doubt that the cage of counterrevolution can be broken.

Men of good will propose to civilize the class war which is at the origin of the wars between States. We wish them good luck. In a single century (1914 – 2022), the different imperialisms brought humanity to the brink of the abyss four times: the First and Second World Wars, with Nazism as the climax; the Cold War, in which the possibility of the nuclear end of humanity was actualized for the first time. The current war – of which Ukraine will be but an episode – could revive the latter eventuality.

With regard to this tragic and recurrent repetition of wars between imperialisms (not even counting the others), it is a matter of reconstructing the relations of international force and of elaborating a concept of war (of strategy) adequate to this new situation. The Communist Manifesto gave a definition that is still very current, even if it has been eliminated or fallen into the oblivion of pacification: “uninterrupted war, sometimes dissimulated, sometimes open”. Disguised or open, it requires always and in any case a knowledge of the relations of force; a strategy and an art of rupture adapted to these relations. Historically, war – although it seems that also today – can give rise to a “revolutionary transformation” or to a new accumulation of capital on a world scale. Another possibility that Marx and Engels’ Manifesto considered is on the order of the day, exacerbated by the ecological disaster underway: “the destruction” not only “of the two classes in struggle” but also of all humanity.

Translation by Internationalist 360°

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/04/ ... evolution/
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Re: France

Post by blindpig » Sat Apr 15, 2023 1:38 pm

The French Urge Constitutional Court Not To Back Pension Reform

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Police block the Constitutional Council in Paris, France, April 13, 2023. | Photo: Twitter/ @ContreAttaque_

Published 13 April 2023

On Friday afternoon, the Constitutional Council must rule on the validity of the reform, which proposes to delay the retirement age to 64 years by 2030.

On Thuesday, thousands of French citizens took to the streets to demand that the Constitutional Council not approve President Emmanuel Macron’s pension reform proposal.

"If the Council approves this project, we will continue to take again to the streets and hold more demonstrations," said Tamara Aslamov, an 18-year-old college student, in front of the Paris Opera.

On Friday afternoon, the Constitutional Council must rule on the validity of the reform, which proposes to delay the retirement age to 64 years by 2030 and to bring forward to 2027 the requirement to contribute 43 years to receive a full pension.

On March 7, over 3.5 million citizens protested against this reform. Authorities registered that about 600,000 people are participating in today's demonstrations, which mark the twelfth day of mass protests against this initiative.


The tweet reads, "In Paris, the French Police Reserve has no other objective than to injure peaceful demonstrators."

The Police banned any demonstration at the Constitutional Council, whose headquarters is nearby the Louvre Museum, from Thursday night and deployed a security device in this area.

Polls showed that most French citizens oppose the reform, which Macron approved without waiting for the necessary parliamentary procedures. “This initiative is indispensable to avoid a future deficit in the pension fund amid the population aging,” the President alleged.

"This imposition of this reform has provoked a national democratic crisis. We have no option but to fight against this proposal, which is far from over," said Laurent Berger, a leader of the French Democratic Confederation of Labour (CFDT) union.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/The ... -0011.html

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French President signs pension reform law

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Following the approval of the pension reform by the Constitutional Council, the French presidency had announced that it would promulgate the law over the weekend. | Photo: EFE
Posted April 15, 2023 (6 hours 28 minutes ago)

The French unions called for the International Workers' Day to a national mobilization against the pension reform.


Despite the immense popular rejection of the pension reform in France, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, promulgated this Saturday the law that raises the retirement age to 64 years and the requirement to contribute 43 years from 2027 to receive a full pension .

Macron's decision came after the approval on the eve of the reform to the pension system by the members of the Constitutional Council.

After the approval of the constitutional body, the French presidency had announced that Emmanuel Macron was going to promulgate the law over the weekend, despite the request of the unions to delay its ratification.


On Friday, thousands of people mobilized in the streets of the capital and the main cities of the country in rejection of the approval of the reform.


The unions called for a national mobilization for International Workers' Day on May 1 and warned that they will not meet with the president or the government before that date.

The centrals and labor unions have led the protests since January against the pension reform.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/presiden ... -0003.html

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Re: France

Post by blindpig » Sun Apr 16, 2023 2:28 pm

French workers take to the streets as Macron’s pension reform becomes law

Protests broke out in France after the country’s Constitutional Council ratified the key provisions of the controversial pension reforms. President Emmanuel Macron signed the bill into law early on Saturday

April 15, 2023 by Peoples Dispatch

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French workers protest the pension reforms. Photos: Joris Château/L'Humanité

Spontaneous protests broke out in France on April 14, Friday, after the country’s Constitutional Council ratified the increase in the retirement age from 62 to 64, the most controversial aspect of the pension reforms pushed by the Emmanuel Macron-led government. Macron signed the bill into law early on Saturday.

Even though the Council struck down certain provisions of the bill, it also rejected the first version of the Referendum of Shared Initiative (RIP) on the implementation of the reforms. The proposal for the referendum was submitted by the MPs from the left-wing New Ecologic and Social Peoples Union’s (NUPES) coalition. The Constitutional Council will decide on a second RIP on May 3.

The coordination of the trade unions, which includes the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), called for protests to continue until the ‘reforms’ are rolled back A fresh round of protests is scheduled for May 1

On April 13, in the twelfth round of major mobilization, hundreds of thousands of people took part in 280 demonstrations and rallies across the country against the reforms, and demanded a referendum. At several places, the police attacked the protesters brutally.

The pension reforms were announced by French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne on January 10 this year. They stipulate the phased raising of the retirement age in France from 62 to 64, at the rate of three months per year, from September 1, 2023 until 2030. In order to get a full-rate pension, workers will have to work for 43 years instead of the current 42. This provision will come into effect fully by 2027.

Since January, massive protests have been organized against the reforms by trade unions and the left-wing coalition New Ecologic and Social Peoples Union’s (NUPES). On March 16, Prime Minister Borne invoked the emergency provision Article 49.3 of the constitution to bypass voting in the National Assembly and passed the law. The government managed to survive a vote of no-confidence on March 20 by just nine votes.

On April 14, Friday evening, Ian Brossat spokesman of the French Communist Party (PCF) said. “A bad reform does not become good once the Constitutional Council has validated it. It has no popular legitimacy. The only way out: social mobilization and the referendum.”

NUPES leader Jean-Luc Melenchon tweeted that “the decision of the Constitutional Council shows that it is more attentive to the needs of the presidential monarchy than to those of the sovereign people. The struggle continues and must gather its forces.”

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/04/15/ ... comes-law/

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French President Emmanuel Macron meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on April 6, 2023

France’s Macron opposes U.S. cold war on China, wants independent Europe–but is it just rhetoric?
By Ben Norton (Posted Apr 15, 2023)

Originally published: Geopolitical Economy Report on April 11, 2023 (more by Geopolitical Economy Report) |

France’s President Emmanuel Macron has called for Europe to be more independent of the United States, suggesting that Paris does not want to be part of Washington’s new cold war on China.

Macron insisted that Europe should develop its own “strategic autonomy” and not simply be “followers” or “vassals” of the U.S.

The French leader has made comments like these in the past, however, and has failed to take concrete actions to challenge U.S. hegemony.



In 2018, Macron (and his German counterpart, Angela Merkel) called for creating a “true European army”, as part of “a Europe which defends itself better alone, without just depending on the United States, in a more sovereign manner”. Yet nothing came of it.

Paris even helped develop an alternative payment mechanism to circumvent illegal U.S. sanctions on Iran, called INSTEX, but the system was barely used before it was shut down in early 2023.

These facts, combined with the significant opposition against Macron’s proposed policies inside the European Union, suggest that the French leader will not be able to alter the region’s aggressive foreign policy against China, even if his intentions are genuine.


Macron warns Europe must not be “followers” or “vassals” of the US
Macron took a three-day trip to China this April, where he met with President Xi Jinping.

Following the meeting, Politico published an exclusive interview with Macron.

The French leader warned that there is a “great risk” if Europe “gets caught up in crises that are not ours, which prevents it from building its strategic autonomy”.

“If the tensions between the two superpowers heat up … we won’t have the time nor the resources to finance our strategic autonomy and we will become vassals”, he said.

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The European Parliament acknowledged that, “In 2020, China took over the position as the EU’s main trading partner in goods from the U.S., with an overall share of 16.2% in 2021 compared with 14.7% for the US”.

In 2021, 22% of EU imports came from China—double the 11% from the U.S., and significantly more than the 8% of imports from Russia, 7% from the United Kingdom, and 6% from Switzerland, according to Eurostat data.

In the same year, 10% of EU exports went to China, making it the third most important foreign market for Eurozone goods after the UK (13%) and the U.S. (18%).

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This also explains why Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited China in November, and took a similarly conciliatory position toward Beijing.

Following his trip, Scholz emphasized in an op-ed for Politico, “We don’t want to decouple from China, but can’t be overreliant”.

The German leader acknowledged that “new centers of power are emerging in a multipolar world”, adding that “we aim to establish and expand partnerships with all of them”.

In the case of Berlin, the issue is even more urgent.

Germany’s top trading partner is China, providing the European nation with 12% of its imports in 2021—roughly double Germany’s 6.1% of imports from the U.S.

The Chinese market is also the second-most important for German goods, representing 7.6% of its exports in the same year, compared to 8.8% for the U.S.

France’s economy is not as interconnected with China’s, but the Asian giant is still very important, as Paris’ seventh-biggest customer and sixth-biggest supplier in 2021.

Germany and France are the Eurozone’s two largest economies, representing roughly 41% of the EU’s entire economy (24.26% and 16.72%, respectively). So if they oppose decoupling from China, it is difficult to see how the rest of the region could try to do so.

However, whether or not Berlin or Paris could muster the political capital needed to challenge Washington’s hegemony is another question altogether.

In 2019, they apparently tried to do so—but failed.

The failure (or abandonment) of the INSTEX mechanism for trade with Iran
European governments were angry that U.S. President Donald Trump sabotaged the Iran nuclear deal by unilaterally withdrawing in May 2018, in flagrant violation of a UN Security Council resolution and therefore international law.

Washington imposed heavy sanctions on Iran. But Europe wanted to continue trading with the West Asian nation.

So, in response, Germany, France, and Britain developed the Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges (INSTEX), a new payment mechanism to circumvent U.S. sanctions.

Economist Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, founder of the Bourse & Bazaar Foundation think tank, recalled that, “In August 2018, EU high representative Federica Mogherini and foreign ministers Jean-Yves Le Drian of France, Heiko Maas of Germany, and Jeremy Hunt of the United Kingdom, issued a joint statement in which they committed to preserve ‘effective financial channels with Iran, and the continuation of Iran’s export of oil and gas’ in the face of the returning U.S. sanctions”.

However, there was a problem, Batmanghelidj wrote:

Many European technocrats were reluctant to support a project which had the overt aim of blunting U.S. sanctions power, even at a time when figures such as French finance minister Bruno Le Maire and Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte were making bold statements about the need for European economic sovereignty. Even INSTEX’s inaugural managing director, Per Fischer, departed given concerns over his association with a company that had been maligned by American officials as a sanctions busting scheme. Then, in May 2019, when the Trump administration cancelled a set of sanctions waivers, European purchases of Iranian oil ended.

By January 2023, INSTEX was shut down—just four years after it was created, with little to show for it.


Batmanghelidj concluded that “many considered the INSTEX project doomed even before the first transaction was completed”, and “most of the blame for INSTEX’s failure must lie with the Europeans”.

“European officials promised a historic project to assert their economic sovereignty, but they never really committed to that undertaking”, he said.

If such an undertaking failed so recently, it is difficult to see how Europe could today challenge U.S. policy on an even more politically sensitive issue, and on a much bigger scale.

Yes, China is significantly more important for Europe’s economy than Iran was, but the pressure from Washington is also much greater.

The EU is already joining the U.S. tech war on China
In fact, European states are already capitulating to the United States and joining its tech war on China.

Following Washington’s lead, the Netherlands has restricted the export of advanced microchip technology to Beijing.

The European Commission vice-president for trade relations, Valdis Dombrovskis, has said this ban may expand to all of the Eurozone.

“The way export controls function in the EU, it’s a national decision. But there is a possibility also to bring this decision (to) the EU level. The Dutch authorities have indicated they have this interest”, Dombrovskis stated in March.


If Macron is truly committed to European “strategic autonomy” and relative independence from the United States, France may have to abandon the EU itself.

Is Paris willing to do so?

Back in 2018, when Donald Trump was president, Macron called for a “true European army”, arguing, “We have to protect ourselves with respect to China, Russia and even the United States of America… We need a Europe which defends itself better alone, without just depending on the United States, in a more sovereign manner”.

Then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel agreed. Echoing Macron, she told the European parliament that November, “The times when we could rely on others is past”, and, “We have to look at the vision of one day creating a real, true European army”.

But what came of this? Nothing.

In fact, five years later, Europe is even more dependent on—and subordinated to—the United States than ever before.

The proxy war against Russia in Ukraine has only deepened Washington’s influence over Brussels, strengthening and unifying NATO under U.S. leadership.

France’s questionable role in Ukraine’s Minsk accords
France’s purported commitment to paving the path of an independent foreign policy was called into question by Paris’ questionable role in Ukraine.

A U.S.-backed coup overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected, geopolitically neutral government in 2014, installing a pro-Western regime. This ignited a civil war.

Ostensibly in order resolve the conflict, France and fellow EU member Germany oversaw peace talks between Ukraine and Russia, in the so-called Normandy Format. In 2015, they passed the Minsk II accords.

The Minsk protocols required Ukraine to decentralize state authority and provide autonomy for the eastern Donbass region, specifically for the embattled provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk. Yet Kiev refused to do so.

Macron’s predecessor, former French President François Hollande, admitted in a call with Russian pranksters Vivan and Lexus that Ukraine had instead used the Minsk accords to bide time to prepare for war with Moscow.

“There was the idea that it was Putin who had wanted to buy time, but it was us [France and Germany] who wanted to buy time to allow Ukraine to recover, to strengthen its resources”, Hollande said.

“That’s why we have to defend the Minsk negotiations, in which [Poroshenko] played a very important role. It was precisely during these seven years that there were ways for Ukraine to strengthen itself”, the former French leader added.

The Russian pranksters had impersonated Ukraine’s ex-President Petro Poroshenko in order to get Hollande to agree to the video discussion. When Hollande found out who they really were, he tried to downplay his comments.

But this was not the first time Hollande had made such an admission.

Anti-Russian newspaper the Kyiv Independent interviewed Hollande in December, and asked him about remarks from former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who had stated, “It was obvious that the conflict was going to be frozen, that the problem was not solved, but [the Minsk accords] just gave Ukraine precious time”.

Hollande replied, “Angela Merkel is right on this point”.

The former French president added, “Since 2014, Ukraine has strengthened its military posture. Indeed, the Ukrainian army was completely different from that of 2014. It was better trained and equipped. It is the merit of the Minsk agreements to have given the Ukrainian army this opportunity”.

Although Hollande is not Macron, the two share many of the same views, and France’s foreign policy has remained consistent.

This recent historical precedent suggests Paris may not be an honest diplomatic broker.

For his part, Ukraine’s current Western-backed leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, admitted this February that he never planned to honor Minsk II, calling the peace deal with Russia an unacceptable “concession”.


Zelensky said he had clearly told Macron and Merkel that “we cannot implement it”.

“Procrastination is perfectly fine in diplomacy”, he explained.

This revelation that Paris had known about Kiev’s unwillingness to abide by a peace agreement it had signed, but publicly expressed no concerns, reflects very negatively on France’s political commitments. There is no doubt that Beijing has watched the whole affair closely.

Neoconservatives in Europe (and the US) denounce Macron’s calls for more independence
Despite Macron’s many transparent limitations, the interview he conducted with Politico following his April 2023 visit to China set off a diplomatic scandal inside Europe.

A group of neoconservative politicians from the hawkish Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC) published a letter condemning Macron’s “ill-judged remarks” on Taiwan, Politico noted in a follow-up report.

They declared, “It should be emphasized that the president’s words are severely out of step with the feeling across Europe’s legislatures and beyond”.

Right-wing, pro-US political leaders in Eastern Europe were even angrier.

Poland’s far-right Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki declared in the airport in Warsaw, “Instead of building strategic autonomy from the United States, I propose a strategic partnership with the United States”.

Morawiecki made these comments as he boarded a plane to fly to Washington for a three-day state visit.

Neoconservative U.S. Senator Marco Rubio published a furious video on Twitter, arrogantly telling Macron, “Maybe, we should basically say we are going to focus on Taiwan and the threats that China poses, and you guys handle Ukraine and Europe”.


Britain’s establishment newspaper The Guardian quoted more hawkish European officials who denounced Macron’s opposition to the new cold war on China.

It noted that the Wall Street Journal’s reliably right-wing editorial board condemned Macron as well.

In short, there is a lot of momentum against Macron. And there is very little indication that he has the will, yet alone the ability, to handle it.

Macron is wildly unpopular at home
None of this is to mention that Macron has barely any support at home.

This March, Macron’s approval rating hit a record low of a mere 23%, with 72% disapproval, according to the polling firm Morning Consult.

Since he came to power in 2017, the French president has faced mass protests against his right-wing neoliberal economic reforms, from the Yellow Vests mass movement to constant strikes.

[youtube]http://twitter.com/i/status/1640856682539483140[/youtube]

In fact, while he was in Beijing, French unions were leading huge demonstrations against Macron’s attempts to raise the retirement age.

Workers are outraged as their real wages fall in France, and across the region.

Meanwhile, corporate profits in the Eurozone are at a record high.


Many EU leaders are skeptical of Macron’s call for “strategic autonomy”, preferring to follow U.S. orders
The limited room that Macron has to maneuver was reflected by the fact that he wasn’t even able to travel to China alone.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen joined Macron in Beijing—although she spent much less time meeting with Xi than the French leader did.

Von der Leyen, the de facto EU chief, pushed a much more aggressive, antagonistic line against China, lecturing it on the so-called “rules-based international order” and the need for Russia to withdraw its troops from Ukraine.

Beijing has long criticized the West’s vague concept of the “rules-based international order”, which is never clearly defined. Instead, China has upheld the international law-based order with its center in the United Nations.

A photo of von der Leyen and Macron sitting far away from Xi at a large circular table symbolically represented the political distance between the leaders.

The Chinese press did express some hope that, perhaps, France could articulate a more independent policy.

State media outlet Xinhua quoted President Xi, who “noted the profound historic transformation taking place in the world, and pointed out that China and France, as permanent members of the United Nations (UN) Security Council, major countries with a tradition of independence, and firm advocates for a multi-polar world and for greater democracy in international relations”.

This was a hint that Beijing welcomes Paris’ calls for “strategic autonomy”, and would like Europe to establish itself as a separate pole in a multipolar world.

But whether or not France could do so, if its political will truly is genuine, is highly dubious.

https://mronline.org/2023/04/15/frances ... -rhetoric/
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Re: France

Post by blindpig » Tue Apr 18, 2023 2:12 pm

French pension row set to persist
By EARLE GALE in London | China Daily Global | Updated: 2023-04-17 09:16

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Protesters clash with police officers outside Place de la Republique in Rennes, France, on Saturday, during a demonstration against pension reforms hours after they were signed into law. LOU BENOIST/AFP

Unions in France have vowed to continue their opposition to the government's pension reforms, despite President Emmanuel Macron signing them into law early Saturday.

The reforms — which include a shift in the state pension age from 62 to 64 and an increase in the number of years of work needed to qualify for a full pension — have angered workers and triggered months of strikes and protests.

Macron, who used special constitutional powers in March to force the changes through Parliament without a vote, has insisted the country cannot afford to leave the pension system as it was.

But the nation's unions have said they will keep up their opposition, and now focus on trying to force Macron to reverse the changes he has made.

The unions have organized 12 days of demonstrations and strikes since January in opposition to the changes and say another protest, on May 1, must be the largest so far.

Jean-Luc Melenchon, leader of the left-wing Nupes political alliance that was among several unions and political groups that mounted an unsuccessful last-minute legal challenge to the changes on Friday with the country's nine-member Constitutional Council, said opponents of the reforms must not give up.

"The Constitutional Council's decision shows that it is more attentive to the needs of the presidential monarchy than to those of the sovereign people," he said. "The fight continues and must gather its forces."

On the other side of the political spectrum, Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Rally party, agreed, saying on social media "the political fate of the pension reform is not sealed" and that people must continue to oppose it.

Sophie Binet, leader of the CGT union, urged people to form a "popular and historic tidal wave" of protest on May 1, while Fabien Roussel, leader of the French Communist Party, tweeted: "A law enacted in the middle of the night, like thieves. Everyone on the street May 1."

Olivier Dussopt, France's labor minister, said that, despite the planned protest, the pension reforms will be implemented, likely in September.

He added that he will encourage employers to offer jobs to older people needing to work for longer than originally planned.

The Constitutional Council's decision to allow Macron's changes and not to order a referendum precipitated an explosion of protest in Paris, with several fires lit on Saturday and more than 100 people arrested.

Radio France International said protests also flared in Lyon, Marseille, Nantes, Rennes, and Toulouse.

Antoine Bristielle, a political analyst, told the BBC the protests will likely continue.

"I think we will see … a lot of riots and strikes in the country because 70 percent of the French population is still against the reform," he said.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20230 ... cdf21.html

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Protests In France After Macron's Speech In The Netherlands

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Unions are preparing for a twelfth round of protests on Thursday. Apr. 17, 2023. | Photo: Twitter/@Un_CitoyenBanal

Published 17 April 2023

In the French capital, 2 000 people joined in three marches.

Protests in France erupted Monday as President Emmanuel Macron delivered a speech in the Netherlands, where he is on a two-day visit. This is his first after enacting the pension reform law.

Paris, Rennes, Bordeaux, Lyon, and Marseille, among others, saw hundreds of protesters rally in the streets, local media reported, noting that in the French capital, 2 000 people joined in three marches.

Barricades were burned, police fired tear gas to disperse the crowd, and at least 11 arrests were made. Unions are preparing for a twelfth round of protests on Thursday.

Meanwhile, a group of protesters disrupted French President Emmanuel Macron's speech at the Nexus Institute in The Hague by shouting "Where is French democracy?" Security guards forcibly removed the protesters from the lecture hall.


During his speech, the president said the modification will come into force in September. Referring to the millions of French people who demonstrated against the reform, Macron said that "no one, least of all me, can remain deaf to this demand for social justice and the renewal of our democratic life."

Last Saturday, Macron signed into law the controversial law raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 and the requirement to contribute 43 years from 2027 to collect the full pension.



https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Pro ... -0016.html
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Re: France

Post by blindpig » Tue May 02, 2023 2:00 pm

No respite as Macron faces Labour Day protests
China Daily | Updated: 2023-05-02 07:32

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A demonstrator throws a tear gas during the traditional May Day labour march, a day of mobilisation against the French pension reform law and for social justice, in Nantes, France May 1, 2023. [Photo/Agencies]

PARIS — France's President Emmanuel Macron faced more nationwide protests on Monday as he seeks to steer the country on from a divisive pension law that has sparked anger, pan-bashing and social unrest.

Last month, he signed a law to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64, despite months of strikes.

He and his government have since tried to turn the page on the episode of popular discontent, one of the biggest challenges, to his second mandate.

But protesters have booed and banged pots and pans at him on his forays into provincial France to meet members of the public.

When Macron attended a football match on Saturday, he was met with activists waving red cards.

Unions and the opposition were hoping for a mass turnout at the May Day rallies to let Macron know they continue to oppose the pension law.

"I invite all French men and women… to go out and catch the sun, to tan while pushing their baby strollers in the streets of Paris and the rest of the country," Francois Ruffin, a member of parliament for the hard-left France Unbowed party, said on Sunday.

"We are making sure 2023 goes down in the country's social history," he told broadcaster BFMTV ahead of the public holiday.

Almost three in four French people were unhappy with Macron, a survey by the IFOP polling group found last month.

France has been rocked by a dozen days of nationwide strikes and protests against Macron and his pension changes since mid-January, some of which have turned violent.

But momentum has waned at recent strikes and demonstrations held during the working week, as workers appear unwilling to continue to sacrifice pay.

UK unions divided

In the latest development of strike action in the United Kingdom, British healthcare and ambulance workers belonging to the GMB trade union have voted to accept a government pay offer, the union said on Friday, hours after members of another union rejected it.

The offer, agreed between the government and healthcare union leaders last month, included a one-off payment equivalent to 2 percent of salaries in the 2022-23 financial year and a 5 percent pay rise for 2023-24.

GMB's backing means the offer has been accepted by four unions representing National Health Service workers whose members include midwives, physiotherapists and ambulance workers.

The long-running dispute has led to hundreds of thousands of NHS staff taking strike action over the last few months, adding to strains on the health service.

Other public sector workers in Britain, including teachers, as well as train staff have staged strikes in recent months as they demand higher pay deals in the face of an inflation rate that remains above 10 percent.

The NHS Staff Council, which includes representatives from NHS employers and trade unions, is due to meet on Tuesday to vote on whether to accept the offer.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20230 ... d0ad9.html

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Police Attack the French on International Workers' Day

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Police try to disperse a march in Paris, May 1, 2023. | Photo: Twitter/ @Mrgunsngear

Published 1 May 2023 (21 hours 32 minutes ago)

“Never has the 1st of May mobilized as many people as today. Unity between unions has never lasted so long... We will continue to the end,” a French worker said.


On Monday, the French police harshly repressed the protests that thousands of people carried out in cities such as Paris, Lyon, Nantes, Toulouse or Besancon.

In Paris, where citizens began to march from the Republic Square towards the Nation Square, police brutality sparked a strong reaction among the people, who smashed shop windows and banking establishments as well as set fire to containers and other street furniture.

The agents fired tear gas at the protesters, 30 of whom were arrested, according to data from the Police Prefecture, cut off at 3:00 p.m. local time.

In Nantes, the farmers accompanied with their tractors the march called by the General Confederation of Labor (CGT). People set fire to litter bins in front of the prefecture, where there were also strong clashes with the police.

In this French city, a citizen lost his hand as a result of the repression, as reported by the television channel France 3.


The tweet reads, "The wave of police violence continues in Paris. The France confiscated by Macron still offers the world the pitiful spectacle of a Police State adrift."

“Never has the 1st of May mobilized as many people as today. Unity between unions has never lasted so long. We will not separate from each other. We will continue to the end,” a French worker said, as reported by the newspaper Le Progres.

This local outlet also mentioned that citizens took over the esplanade of the Saint-Etienne town hall, where they lit a bonfire to reject the increase in the retirement age to 64 years.

In Lyon, windows of commercial establishments were broken and a luxury car was set on fire, according to France Info. In Besancon, the security forces arrested about 20 demonstrators who were taking part in a rally outside the route of the workers' march.

Previously, the Interior Ministry mobilized 5,000 police officers to Paris and 7,000 to other cities to contain the protests. The secret services had calculated that at least 650,000 people were ready to participate in some 300 marches across the country.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Pol ... -0012.html
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Re: France

Post by blindpig » Wed May 03, 2023 2:05 pm

French May Day rally vents ire against pension law
By Chen Weihua in Paris and Jonathan Powell in London | China Daily | Updated: 2023-05-03 07:08

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A protester throws a tear gas shell toward police amid clashes during a demonstration on May Day, to mark the international day of workers, in Nantes, northwestern France, on Monday. LOIC VENANCE/AFP

People angered by pension law and nurses demanding economic justice took to streets across France and the United Kingdom on Monday to mark the May Day, joining the worldwide workers' rally in an outpouring of discontent not seen since the COVID-19 pandemic.

French police charged at protesters and troublemakers smashing bank and shop windows and setting fires as unions pushed the president to scrap a higher retirement age.

Protesters took to the streets across France on Monday to oppose the pension reform despite the fact that President Emmanuel Macron had already signed the reform into law on April 15, a day after the country's top court, the Constitutional Council, approved major pension reform measures.

Police used tear gas at protesters in several cities, including Paris, where an officer was injured after being struck in the face by a Molotov cocktail reportedly thrown by a masked Black Bloc anarchist on the sidelines of the march.

French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said that 108 police officers had been injured and 291 arrests were made across the country, including 90 in Paris.

French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne condemned the violent actions by some protesters.

According to the French Interior Ministry, there were 782,000 protesters, including 112,000 in Paris.

"The government has lied. It has money for war, (but) not for pension, not for hospital, for education," Mike from Paris, who only wants to be identified by his first name, said at Place de la Republique, the starting point of Monday's march in Paris.

Regis Frutier agreed, saying the rich have become richer in France.

Frutier is not sure if the mass protest on Monday will have an impact on the pension reform which has already become law. "But we are for resist. It's our duty," said Frutier, who belongs to the CGT, one of the largest unions in France.

Meanwhile, nurses in England staged their biggest strike so far in their pay dispute on Monday, with hospital leaders warning that services would come under severe strain and the public being urged to use the National Health Service "wisely".

Some nurses who work in accident and emergency, intensive care and cancer services joined the picket lines for the first time.

The Royal College of Nursing members in more than 100 NHS organizations started 28 hours of strike action that ran from Sunday evening until late on Monday, in the widest nursing strike to face the NHS so far, reported the BBC.

The strike went ahead despite a new NHS pay offer from the government that is expected to be approved by most health unions this week.

A meeting on Tuesday between unions, ministers and NHS bosses was scheduled to discuss whether to accept the government's offer of a 5-percent pay rise and one-off bonus. The RCN is among the unions to have voted to reject the deal.

Elsewhere, South Koreans pleaded for higher wages as did others around Latin America. Spanish lawyers demanded the right to take days off. Migrant domestic workers in Lebanon marched in a country plunged into economic crisis.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20230 ... d0c58.html
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Re: France

Post by blindpig » Fri May 05, 2023 1:34 pm

A Monumental Crisis in France
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MAY 4, 2023
Luis Lazaro Tijerina

Image

I used to frequently visit a Café namely Café de Flore and it was outside of the Café de Flore on Saint Germain, that I witnessed the first marches of political anger against the Macron regime. Later with a photographer friend of mine, a Mexican American, who wisely moved to Paris at a very young age, I saw the workers of France.

I would march with the men and women of France to the Place de la République, where I eventually became trapped by the harsh and brutal French gendarmes. I was fortunate to escape the trap with the help of a young French woman student from la Sorbonne. If it had not been for her, I would have ended up in a French prison or beaten with a black baton.

Now, for the less personal view of the French protest experience, for the actual reality of being a worker in France has nothing to do with sitting smugly in a smart café in Paris and mouthing off about revolution. The French workers understand that standing up to French regimes is a serious business and that one can lose one’s limb or life in a protest against a very deadly machine like the one Macron imposes on the streets of Paris.

As the journalist, Thierry Meyssan wrote in a vivid and historical way while describing the strikes in France:

The crisis that France is going through today is not just another episode in an eternally agitated country. It is about a deep crisis of mode which will be solved only with the beginning of a new society. The country will go through several years of blockage, before embarking on a complete transformation, a revolution that will last at least a generation.

For several weeks, monster demonstrations have followed one after another in France. There is no more fuel in the service stations of many departments and hundreds of tons of garbage pile up in the center of large cities.

President Emmanuel Macron has managed to impose a pension reform. His text solves no problem and creates many injustices. For example, people who started working at age 16 will only be able to access retirement with a number of working years greater than those granted to people who started at age 18. In a country that loves equality in law, this text should not have passed.


Mr. Meyssan when speaking of “another episode” is of course referring to the various crises such as when Vichy France collaborated with Nazi Germany occupiers and humiliated not only the French army but the French people as well or the Indo-China crisis where the French army was defeated decisively at Dien Bien Phu during their colonial occupation of Vietnam or the Algerian crisis, when De Gaulle was courageous and able enough to thwart a military coup that resisted his declaration to give the Algerian people their Self-Determination and Independence.

If we are inclined to be observant of other “episodes”, one could recount in full measure how Louis XV abandoned the French-Canadian people before and after the Battle of Quebec of 1759. Louis XV attempted to promote fiscal reforms such as taxing the French nobility, but his foreign policy failures weakened France, especially during the Seven Years War and further strained its finances. As a result of lost wars overseas and in Europe, Louis was forced to cede many colonized territories, including Quebec which was also called New France. All of this was due to overreaching towards a colonial hegemony which was to end in disaster. The historical past of a nation-state carries itself into the lives of the living. France is no different than any other present, declining Western European power who has forgotten the needs and the literal hunger of its people with its hunger and its corporate greed both at home and abroad.

In France, bread is a key food source and staple for the French people.

Recently an American news outlet reported the following on the bread situation in France with this commentary:

In November, the United Nations Educational Scientific and cultural Organization, or UNESCO, designated the French baguette as part of “intangible culture heritage,” owing to the specific knowledge and techniques needed to produce it, as well as the central role it plays in daily life. But despite their cherished status, many bakeries are struggling – and some are on the brink of closure – as energy prices and the costs of ingredients have spiked. “Everything has gone up,” said Nicolas Amaté, who owns a bakery in eastern France with his wife Nadège. “If this continues, we will all close”, he told CNN.

Macron and his ministers do not understand that if you take away from the French people their bread, then they will serve you the pike. Such is the longevity of the French Revolution and its ongoing process not only with the modern French workers and their families dealing with the imposition of a draconian pension reform, but also with the rising costs of food and rental housing as well. In 2014, a French television station, FRANCE 24, which is neo-liberal media conglomerate, reported how the rising costs of living decently in Paris lead to unusual accommodations…


A medieval monastery in the heart of the Latin Quarter. An 18th-century hôtel particulier, or mansion, just steps from the Louvre. A 19th-century barracks near the Gare de Lyon. The former home and workshop of one of France’s premier piano makers, where Frédéric Chopin played his first public concert.

These Paris buildings have one, perhaps surprising, thing in common: They’ve all been transformed, partially or fully, into public housing over the past five years under Socialist Mayor Anne Hidalgo. They represent a small sample of the unprecedented expansion of public (or “social”) housing in the French capital under Hidalgo as well as her predecessor, fellow Socialist Bertrand Delanoë.

But these cosmetic efforts by the so-called socialist mayors of Paris do nothing to stop the rise of criminal rents wherein the working-class French people cannot afford to pay housing costs and still purchase food for their daily lives. As per The Guardian there is the harsh fact that ordinary people can no longer afford to live in Paris proper:

The city’s population has dropped by more than 123,000 in the last decade, with many leaving in search of cheaper housing and green spaces, according to official figures. France’s statistics agency, Insee, says Paris is losing about 12,400 people a year and the city population – now at about 2.1 million – is at its lowest for 20 years.

The Covid pandemic and lockdowns are seen as a factor but the cost of housing is a key motivation: the average a square metre is about €10,000. Many of those who have left the capital have moved further out in the Île-de-France region – that includes Paris – whose population is 12.4 million and where property and rents are more affordable.

“Departures from the capital are motivated in particular by the high cost of housing, the reduced supply of large housing for family and the search for a different living environment,” Insee reported.

As an opposition Paris councillor, Nelly Garnier, told BFMTV, “city hall” was “in denial” about the real problems.

“I talk to Parisians and they are disgusted … Paris was always the place you wanted to come to so you could live your dreams, now it’s a confused city. We are angry with Anne Hidalgo and her green [coalition] allies turning it into a city people want to flee. They have degraded life in Paris.”

This “denial” that the opposition speaks of now in 2023 is a denial of the very basic rights of the French workers to live decent lives, which the Macron regime had denied them, and which has now lead to militant strikes and violence in the streets of France.

In the later days of March the streets of Paris were littered with garbage and the endless smoke of tear gas. As Reuters reported about these days of strikes and violent protests in Paris and beyond –

Earlier in the French capital, a group of students and activists from the “Revolution Permanente” collective briefly invaded the Forum des Halles shopping mall, waving banners calling for a general strike and shouting “Paris stand up, rise up”, videos on social media showed.

BFM television also showed images of demonstrations underway in cities such as Compiegne in the north, Nantes in the west and Marseille in the south. In Bordeaux, in the southwest, police also used tear gas against protesters who had started a fire.

These strikes and the fires in the streets of Paris bring about the question of the moral right to forge a revolution, when the very dignity of the working masses is destroyed by all means possible by the multitude of modern imperialist regimes that exist in the early twenty-first century. If one has any fortitude about one’s existence, one does not play the part of a slave. It was the profoundly astute Italian Marxist historian, Domenico Losurdo, who addressed this issue of the moral responsibility to emancipate oneself from capitalist serfdom, when he wrote the following profound and intense commentary on this very issue:

We have seen distinguished liberal thinkers equate wage-workers with horse or machines and work tools, thereby denying them the dignity of moral subjects as well as political subjects. Even more radically and persistently, such a denial has operated to the detriment of the members of ‘inferior races’. The decisive blows dealt to this world are key moments in conferring on every human being, regardless of race, property and sex, the dignity of a moral subject, of being an end in him – or herself. Making a major contribution to the attainment of this result, paradoxically, the French Revolution and the October Revolution helped develop the theoretical and moral tools that enable us to adopt an attitude of mature critical distance towards them, which has nothing to do with the commonplace demonization beloved of ‘Talmon’s sophism’.

In America, the “Talmon’s sophism” is prevalent throughout society from the mainstream news media, from the universities on down to the high schools and secondary schools, where to think in a critical way invites ostracism. We have no poets like Louis Aragon or thinkers like Jean Paul-Sartre, because the United States loathes intellectuality, especially if it is an intellectuality that questions the state and the laws regarding the rights of decent citizens. Spinoza and Marx expounded upon this in an epic way, but without the lies and deceptions of academic arguments. In France, from Voltaire to Sartre there is a history of critical and moral thinking which has kindled the fires of revolution throughout Europe and beyond. I saw this kind of ardor in the faces of the women I marched with on the streets of Paris. I saw French women students’ and North African women workers’ faces and their words brought a type of reckoning never seen on the streets in America.


I remember clearly, on the streets of protest in Paris, with my Leica camera dangling like a weapon from my hip something that Sartre had said and that was “It isn’t freedom from. It’s freedom to.” Being the American that I am, I am still learning to understand that idea of freedom. As the French poet, Aragon wrote “L’homme redoute le risque”—that is, “Man dreads risk”—which is true of all of us at one time or another in this life. What ultimately defines us is how much we are willing to risk to be free from any kind of exploitation.

Perhaps, more than any other Western European people, the French people have always been bold enough to risk losing their lives to fight the oppressor. From the Roman legends to the Nazi army invaders to the present regime which continually limits their ability to live their lives with joy. Unlike the Americans who live to work, the French people work to live, for they love life.

Macron has chosen to run from the people of France during France’s moment of crisis, by travelling or escaping to The People’s Republic of China to initiate deeper trade agreements with that nation. The President of France has put to the side the fact that over a million French people marched in protest against the Pension Reform on March 24, the 10th National Mobilization since January 19, 2023.

It is all too apparent that Macron’s overstretched political ambitions for himself and that of France is an overreach that may cost him his political life, bring about regime change and only create further divide among the social classes of France. Although Macron may have seen himself as donning the mantel of Napoleon Bonaparte, he is actually closer in legacy to Louis XIV. Whereas Napoleon’s political battles were lost on the actual battlefields of Leipzig (also known as the Battle of the Nations) and Waterloo, Macron may well lose his hold on France both in the streets of Paris and in the country sides and cities with the common people of France. As Tocqueville wrote in his work The Old Regime and the French Revolution “The regime which is destroyed by a revolution is almost always an improvement on its immediate predecessor, and experience teaches that the most critical moment for bad governments is the one which witnesses their first steps toward reform.” Macron’s investment in his desire to reform the pension plan for the French people was noted yesterday before the 11th protest today with this commentary by the Latin news network, TeleSURHD:

Trade union leaders, however, refused to address other issues rather than the pension reform. “We are living a serious democratic crisis,” said Laurent Berger, the leader of the French Democratic Confederation of Labour (CFDT). French trade unions urged citizens to participate in the 11th day of mass protests against the pension reform on Thursday. According to polls, two out of three French people oppose such a reform.

Although Tocqueville was a monarchist and liberal for his time, which is a contradiction in itself, as a historian he had the balanced perspective to see how the French people react against oppression even if it is in the guise of “reform”.


As I reach the final passages of my essay on France, I am watching from my computer screen that French workers and students forcing their way into a Paris building that houses the BlackRock’s office, the world’s largest money manager. One can see about a hundred French people holding in their hands red flares that resemble glowing red spears and firing off smoke bombs. The protestors entered the Centorial office, located near the Opéra Garnier opera house, and the silhouetted red light from the flares may be a symbolic presentiment of more agitated and violent protests to come on the streets of Paris. As Jerome Schmitt, spokesman for the French union SUD told the CNN affiliate BFM-Tv “The meaning of this action is quite simple. We went to the headquarters of BlackRock to tell them: the money of workers, for our pensions, they are taking it”. It was fierce protesters in Paris who also attacked and stormed one of French President Emmanuel Macron’s favorite restaurants, La Rotonde bistro, setting it on fire briefly, while also breaking windows of the famous café that I frequented in my youth when I was in the United States army on leave in Paris. Historically, the cafes of Paris have played a significant role in the political upheavals in Paris.

Whether the numbers of protestors on the streets of Paris has dwindled or not on this day of protest, this is not the end of the confrontation of the people of France against the Macron regime. It is actually an ongoing political battle that could end in bloodshed. I am reminded of what Lenin said about such confrontation between the state and the people,

“An oppressed class which does not strive to learn to use arms, to acquire arms, only deserves to be treated like slaves. We cannot, unless we have become bourgeois pacifists or opportunists, forget that we are living in a class society from which there is no way out, nor can there be, save through the class struggle.”

Even today on this historical May day, Paris was on fire again, with thousands of French citizens out in the streets with their rage. According to the Interior Minister of Paris “Nearly 200 people were arrested on a day some 782,000 people took to the streets”.

On the various television channels throughout Western Europe and on CNN in America, there was video of the marchers swaying back and forth along the streets and avenues of Paris waving red flags and in many cases, hundreds of young men and women wearing military style uniforms.

Their voices were threatening like a cascade of violent water washing upon a shore, and the “Gendarmerie nationale” were intimated even with their full black riot gear, shields and black batons. They threw tear gas projectiles at the thousands of men and women, but the people kept surging forward, burning trash in the streets and setting fire to residential flats. Molotov cocktails were thrown at the French police, and one was injured severely.

The wrath of the French people was a volatile fire of angry words raging in Paris, Lyon and Nates. As a sculptor Antoine Eveillo, who was in the protest, said “They (government) are trying to change the subject quite quickly, but let’s say it’s not working. So much the better!” Amid the tear gas canister smoke and the marching of thousands of feet on the streets of Paris, Sophie Binet, leader of the hard-left CGT union said with a few simple words to a reporter,

[/i]“The executive cannot govern without the support of its people.” France is at the beginning of a new era.[/i]

Cover Image Credit: By Bismuth Back

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/05/ ... in-france/

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French Constitutional Council denies second request for a referendum on controversial pension reforms

Protests continue across France demanding the scrapping of the pension reforms law forcefully enacted by the Emmanuel Macron-led government. The reform increases the retirement age in the county from 62 to 64

May 04, 2023 by Peoples Dispatch

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On the evening of Wednesday, May 3, the French Constitutional Council denied for the second time a request by opposition legislators to initiate a referendum on the controversial pension reforms passed by the Emmanuel Macron-led government, which call to increase the retirement age in the country from 62 to 64. The French left and trade unions are outraged at the denial of the request for a Referendum of Shared Initiative (RIP). The earlier request for a referendum was also denied by the council on April 14. Now, a draft proposal for a law abrogating the retirement age, submitted by the parliamentary group Liberties, Independents, Overseas, and Territories (LIOT), will be considered on June 8 in the National Assembly. The trade unions have already given calls for major mobilizations in the first week of June ahead of the convening of the National Council.

The pension reforms were announced by French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne on January 10. The reforms stipulate the phased raising of the retirement age in France from 62 to 64, at the rate of three months per year, from September 1, 2023 until 2030. They also increase the contribution period necessary to obtain a “full-rate” pension, i.e. without discount, from the current 42 years (168 quarters) to 43 years (172 quarters) by 2027, at the rate of one quarter per year.

Read: Pension Reform or Revolution! Crisis for the French Fifth Republic?
Shortly following the announcement in January, massive protests were organized against the reforms by trade unions including the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) and the left-wing coalition New Ecologic and Social Peoples Union (NUPES). However, on March 16, Prime Minister Borne invoked emergency provision Article 49.3 of the constitution to bypass voting in the National Assembly and then passed the law which includes the controversial pension reforms. The protests intensified when the government survived a vote of no-confidence on March 20, which had been tabled by opposition groups in the National Assembly, but failed after falling short of just nine votes. On May 1, around 2.3 million people joined rallies in more than 310 demonstrations across the country demanding withdrawal of the reforms and scrapping the rise in retirement age, according to the CGT.

Responding to the constitutional council’s denial of the request for a referendum, Fabien Roussel, leader of the French Communist Party (PCF), in a tweet called on the French working class to hit the streets on June 6 and asked legislators to oppose the reforms in the National Assembly on June 8.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/05/04/ ... n-reforms/
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Re: France

Post by blindpig » Wed Jun 07, 2023 1:47 pm

French mobilize again against pension reform

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The mobilizations seek to put pressure on the National Assembly to approve an appeal that leads to the annulment of the pension reform. | Photo: @bleuoccitanie
Posted June 6, 2023 (3 hours 5 minutes ago)

Despite the popular rejection of the pension proposal, the French president promulgated the reform in April with a view to its entry into force in September.

Thousands of French people mobilize this Tuesday in the main cities of France as part of a day of protest against the pension reform promoted by President Emmanuel Macron.

The mobilizations and protests seek to put pressure on the plenary session of the National Assembly next Thursday to approve an appeal proposed by the opposition that leads to the annulment of the pension reform.

The general secretary of the General Confederation of Workers (CGT) union, Sophie Binet, denounced this Tuesday that France is an "increasingly authoritarian" country due to the government's attempt to prevent the National Assembly from voting on the proposal that seeks to annul the reform of pensions.


The French president adopted in March by decree the delay of the retirement age from 62 to 64 years by 2030 and the advancement to 2027 of the obligation to contribute 43 years (and not 42) to collect a full pension.

Despite popular rejection of Macron's pension proposal, the president promulgated the reform in April with a view to its entry into force in September.


In support of the new day of mobilizations, the airports of several French cities, including Orly in Paris, canceled 33 percent of their flights.

The airports of Lyon, Marseille, Nice, Toulouse, Bordeaux and Nantes will also be affected and have suppressed 20 percent of their flights.


The authorities expect between 400,000 and 600,000 participants in the 250 planned protests in France, so they deployed some 11,000 police and gendarmes.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/francia- ... -0007.html

Google Translator

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Protests surge in France against abuse of constitutional provisions to defend pension reforms

The French working class is protesting attempts by the government of President Emmanuel Macron to invoke constitutional provisions to block a bill mooted by opposition groups to repeal the pension reforms

June 07, 2023 by Peoples Dispatch

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Protest mobilization in Paris on June 6, 2023. (Photo: via La CGT)

In the 14th major mobilization since January, French workers hit the streets across the country on Tuesday, June 6, protesting the controversial pension reforms forcefully passed by the Emmanuel Macron-led government which increased the retirement age from 62 to 64. The mobilization was called by a coordination of trade unions, left-wing parties of the New Ecological and Social People’s Union (NUPES) coalition, as well as various youth groups. According to the union estimates, over 900,000 people participated in the protests in 250 different locations. Around 300,000 people marched in Paris alone, denouncing the unpopular pension reforms. The protesting unions have expressed support for a bill tabled by opposition groups in the French National Assembly calling to repeal the pension reforms. A vote on the bill will take is likely to take place on June 8.

The pension reforms were announced by French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne on January 10, and stipulated the phased raising of the retirement age from 62 to 64 at a rate of three months per year from September 1, 2023 until 2030. Additionally, workers would have to work for 43 years instead of the current 42 to get a full-rate pension. On March 16, the government used the emergency provision Article 49.3 of the French constitution to bypass final voting on the bill in the National Assembly and passed the 2023 Social Security Financing Adjustment Law amidst fierce opposition from the NUPES and the French working class. The government narrowly survived a no-confidence motion pushed by the opposition on March 20 over the bill. Two requests by the opposition parties to conduct a referendum on raising the retirement age were also denied by the French Constitutional Council.

Now opponents of the reforms, including the NUPES coalition, are pushing a bill tabled by the Liberties, Independents, Overseas and Territories (LIOT) parliamentary bloc to repeal the law. However, the president of the National Assembly has hinted at the possibility of invoking Article 40 of the French constitution to dismiss this bill. Under Article 40, any proposals or amendments made by parliamentarians that would decrease revenue or increase public expenses are not permitted. The discretionary power to determine the admissibility of a bill on these bases currently rests with the president of the National Assembly’s Financial Committee, Eric Coquerel, a legislator from the left-wing La France Insoumise (LFI)

In its statement on May 31, the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) denounced the government’s abuse of constitutional instruments to defend its anti-worker pension reforms.

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Re: France

Post by blindpig » Fri Jun 30, 2023 3:48 pm

Police shooting in Paris sparks anger
By JULIAN SHEA in London | CHINA DAILY | Updated: 2023-06-30 07:01


Officer faces investigation as Macron calls death of teenager 'unforgivable'

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Protesters attend a rally in Paris on Wednesday against police violence and in solidarity with a teenager killed in Nanterre by a police officer during a traffic stop. RAPHAEL LAFARGUE/REUTERS

French President Emmanuel Macron held crisis talks on Thursday after a second night of violence across the country following the fatal shooting by police of a 17-year-old male in Paris.

The victim, Nahel M., was shot in the chest at point-blank range after his car was stopped by police. Initially, the authorities said the officer shot Nahel because he was driving at him, but video shared on social media and authenticated by the Agence France-Presse news agency shows two officers standing on either side of a stationary vehicle, with a gun being pointed at the driver, who is then shot as the vehicle drives off. A 38-year-old police officer is now in custody and under investigation for voluntary manslaughter.

Macron called the killing "inexplicable and unforgivable … nothing can justify the death of a young person", adding the incident had "moved the entire nation", but after the crisis talks, criticized the violent response.

"Clearly the emotion that comes with the death of a young man calls for contemplation and calm, and it's what the government has constantly called for," he said.

"The last hours have been marked by violent scenes against police stations but also schools and town halls, and basically against institutions and the Republic. It's absolutely unjustifiable."

Government official Olivier Veran also condemned the violence and told news channel BFMTV: "When you decide to burn down a school, you're not doing justice to Nahel.

"This morning, some children won't be able to go to school because a school has been burned down and some families won't be able to go to their town hall to get help or documents."

Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne said: "The shocking images (of the shooting) show an intervention that clearly appears as not complying with the rules of engagement of our police forces."

Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin, who has backed the police in similar incidents before, told parliament the video was "extremely shocking", and said the officer would be suspended "if the charges against him are upheld".

Marine Tondelier, leader of the Green Party, said the footage showed "the execution by police of a 17-year-old kid, in France, in 2023, in broad daylight", adding that "it seems like we are heading toward an Americanization of the police", while far-left politician Jean-Luc Melenchon called for "a complete redesign of the police force".

Murder charges sought

A lawyer for the victim's family, Yassine Bouzrou, told The Associated Press news agency that they want the incident to be investigated by non-local officers as they do not trust local police to be impartial, and they would also like to see the officer charged with murder instead of manslaughter.

Some 40,000 police officers will be deployed overnight to quell the violence that engulfed cities and towns in the wake of the shooting, AP reported.

Nanterre prosecutor Pascal Prache said he had requested that the officer be held in custody. That decision is to be made by another magistrate.

Based on an initial investigation, Prache said, he concluded that "the conditions for the legal use of the weapon were not met".

French soccer star Kylian Mbappe, who grew up in the Paris suburb of Bondy, was among many shocked by what happened. "I hurt for my France," he tweeted.

Nahel's surname has not been released by authorities or by his family.

In a separate case, a police officer who fatally shot a 19-year-old Guinean man in western France earlier this month was handed preliminary charges of voluntary homicide, according to a statement by the local prosecutor on Wednesday. The man was shot by an officer as he allegedly tried to escape a traffic stop. The investigation is still ongoing.

Scenes of violence in France's suburban areas echo 2005, when the deaths of 15-year-old Bouna Traore and 17-year-old Zyed Benna led to three weeks of nationwide riots, exposing anger and resentment in suburban housing projects.

This latest fatality comes after 13 deaths at police traffic checks in 2022, following a law change in 2017 that increased officers' ability to use their weapons, which is now under scrutiny.

Police made 150 arrests during a second night of unrest, Reuters reported, as public anger spilled onto the streets in towns and cities across the country.

Around 2,000 riot police were deployed in Paris and its suburbs on Wednesday night, as long-standing anger toward police treatment of ethnic minorities in the city's poorer regions erupted into violent protest, spreading out to other cities, including Lyon and Toulouse.

In Essonne, around 50 kilometers south of Paris, a bus was hijacked and set alight, with a tram being torched in the suburb of Clamart. There were further arson attacks on vehicles, and missiles thrown at the emergency services, in other cities.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20230 ... 6c682.html

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667 People Arrested in Anti-Police Protests in France

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People protesting in France. Jun, 30, 2023. | Photo: Twitter/@Starboy2079

Published 30 June 2023 (6 hours 16 minutes ago)

"...new incidents in the cities of Marseille, Lyon, Pau, Toulouse and Lille..."


At least 667 people, mostly young people between 14 and 18 years old, were arrested in the third consecutive night of unrest in France, with scenes of chaos and looting in several cities following the death of a 17-year-old teenager Nahel at the hands of police on Tuesday.

A large police contingent in Lille, in the north of France, where three nights of violence have left municipal town halls burned or stoned, looting and damage, lashed out against the demonstrators.

The National Police said Thursday night that its forces faced new incidents in the cities of Marseille, Lyon, Pau, Toulouse and Lille, including arson and fireworks-throwing protesters.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Fre ... -0012.html
Anticipating another turbulent night, the government deployed 40,000 agents across the country who, at around 03H00 (01H00 GMT), had already made at least 667 arrests.

Department stores, restaurant chains and banks were also affected, as was the case with a branch of the Credit Mutel bank, located in Nanterre, Nahel's birthplace.


Violence erupted on Tuesday on the outskirts of Paris and spread to other parts of France after the death of 17-year-old Nahel, shot at point-blank range by an officer at a roadblock that was recorded on video.

During a march organized by Nahel's mother, who carried a banner with the slogan "Police Kills," thousands of people chanted phrases such as "Killer Police" and demanded the resignation of Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin.



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Re: France

Post by blindpig » Mon Jul 03, 2023 2:16 pm

Sorrows of France
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JULY 1, 2023
Fabrizio Casari

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One dead, 1300 arrests, cities in flames, 45,000 policemen in the streets. All manner of events and rallies cancelled, a concert at the Stade de France cancelled, all public demonstrations banned by the prefectures of Marseille, Lyon and Bordeaux, in Grenoble, Strasbourg, Toulouse and Montpellier. An impressive balance, almost an ecatomb.

These figures and these prohibitions tell the story of the scene where the revolt of the best France was born and matured. The murder in Nanterre of Nahel, a 17-year-old youth, at the hands of French policemen who had shot him at a checkpoint, has generated days of furious clashes between whole swathes of the population and the French police.

Following the tradition, the agents had spread a version of events that completely denied the truth of what had happened. A lie. A video, recorded by passers-by, showed unequivocally the total responsibility of the police officers who pointed their guns in the face of a 17-year-old boy who was driving a car and who thought he was doing everything but throwing himself at the officers. It was a cold execution, by a policeman who should never have had a uniform, a regulation gun and impunity as a condemnation of submission to anyone who got in his way.

The clashes occur as the police performance confirms the reputation of violence and racism that characterizes it. A police that is the daughter and granddaughter of that deeply reactionary France, nostalgic of Bonapartism and convinced that it owes a debt to History.

France has a serious problem, which is not new, with its police, violence and self-defense groups. In 2022, thirteen people were killed by the police for refusing to comply with an order of the officers, the refus d’obtempérer. The UN also intervened yesterday, with Ravina Shamdasani, spokesperson for the High Commissioner for Human Rights, declaring, “It is time for France to seriously address the profound problems of racial discrimination among police forces.”

It is no coincidence that the worst expression of fascist colonialism, i.e. Marie Le Pen, daughter of the French torturer in the Algerian war, tried to defend the policeman by trying to argue self-defense: her words were immediately contradicted by the recordings and videos of what happened, forcing her to observe a more respectful silence. Le Pen not only expresses the position of her Front Nationale, but also that of a conservatism that identifies with the reactionary verb of restoring order.

President Macron, who has been sharply criticized by French left–wing leader Jean–Luc Mélenchon for not condemning police violence with adequate forcefulness, called on French families to keep their children at home.

But, in the opinion of many, he should have first apologized to the citizenry for yet another criminal behavior by his police and then made it clear that there would be no clemency for the perpetrator. At least, however, he did not go the way of then-President Nicolas Sarkozy, who in 2005 called protesters “racailles” (rioters) and set fire to the riots. Meanwhile, he resists enacting a state of emergency, a measure that disproportionately expands the powers of police forces.

There is this wealthy, white and powerful France that lives and prospers: vestige of colonialism, mask of a foreign policy that speaks of territories beyond the sea while returning to the sea those who come from those territories. A social, racial, cultural and even religious apartheid, which simmers in the banlieues and leaves the best neighborhoods of Paris as heirs to the edict of Saint Cloud.

Living in these banlieues, a few kilometers away from the charm, in the heart of opulent and presumptuous France, are the victims of due immigration, the new French sub-proletariat that lives in France but does not live there.

This portion of France, attracted by Islamic radicalism perhaps, attached to their countries of origin like Morocco or Tunisia certainly, is above all a portion of France against France.

There is not only hatred towards those who exclude them from the social and political discourse, there is also indifference to the classically understood political and social clash. In fact, they did not participate in the yellow vests’ season of struggle, even though the charge of protest against the social order was clear; it is not the struggle for pensions that mobilizes those who do not have jobs and who, therefore, will not have pensions. It is the alienation from the political game, in the absence of a representative system that disseminates and defends their concerns. So it is the rejection of the agora, the general indifference, the total alienation that moves them. And that turns the whistles to the music of the Marseillaise into Molotov and stones.

The funeral of an innocent child, declared forever the son of a whole nation, has made agents, prohibitions, threats and promises superfluous. With the state of emergency before it and what remains of grandeur behind it, the dreams of this satiated and arrogant France are shattered on the rocks of the Maghreb that dwells in its heart...

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/07/ ... of-france/

719 arrested as riots rage for fifth night in France
By CHEN WEIHUA in Brussels | China Daily Global | Updated: 2023-07-03 07:06

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Police surround a vehicle in the Champs-Elysees area in Paris on Sunday during the fifth night of unrest following the killing of 17-year-old Nahel in the suburb of Nanterre. [Photo/Agencies]

French police arrested at least 719 people during the fifth night of protests across the country on Saturday, even as the French interior minister indicated that the night was calmer than the previous ones. Earlier in the day, the funeral of 17-year-old Nahel M. was held in the Paris suburb of Nanterre, where the teenager of Algerian descent once lived and was killed by police.

Nahel was shot at point-blank range by an officer during a traffic stop on Tuesday. A video showed two officers at the window of Nahel's yellow Mercedes, one with his gun pointed at the teenager. As Nahel pulled forward, the officer fired through the windshield.

His death has triggered protests and riots across French cities. French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said that more than 700 shops, supermarkets, restaurants and bank branches had been "ransacked, looted and sometimes even burnt to the ground since Tuesday".

In the past five days, rioters have torched 2,000 vehicles and more than 200 police officers have been injured, French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said on Saturday, adding that the average age of those arrested was 17.

French government dispatched 45,000 police personnel on Saturday to city streets across the country.

Darmanin tweeted at 3am on Sunday that "the night had been calmer than previous ones thanks to the resolution action by the police". On Sunday morning, the interior ministry put the arrests by police during the fifth night at 719.

French President Emmanuel Macron had to postpone a visit to Germany on July 2-4, the first such state visit to Berlin by a French president since 2000. He skipped the second day of the EU summit in Brussels on Friday to return to Paris to deal with the crisis.

Ravina Shamdasani, spokesperson for the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, expressed her concern over the killing. "This is a moment for the country to seriously address the deep issues of racism and discrimination in law enforcement," she said on Friday.

Nahel's funeral was held on Saturday morning in Nanterre. Hundreds gathered in a mosque a few blocks from where he lived to pay their respects.

Nahel's mother said days ago that she was angry at the officer who shot her son, but not at the police in general. "He saw a little Arab-looking kid, he wanted to take his life," she said.

The death reignited the sensitive issue of racial discrimination and police brutality against people of color in France.

France does not provide data based on ethnicity. But a 2017 study by the Defender of Rights, a French human rights watchdog, said young men perceived as black or Arab were much more likely to be stopped by police than their peers.

Persistent poverty, racial discrimination, joblessness and lack of opportunities were serious issues in French communities where many residents trace their roots to former French colonies.

"Riots are not just rooted in France's struggle with structural racism and police violence, but the unequal economic opportunities for its minorities despite being established in French society for three, four generations," Hosuk Lee-Makiyama, director of the Brussels-based European Centre for International Political Economy, told China Daily on Sunday.

He added that Macron will also lose progressive support if he does not recognize the class divide.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20230 ... 6cc98.html

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Macron: Protests in Iran Peaceful but Those in France Unjustifiable
JULY 3, 2023

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French President Emmanuel Macron delivers a speech to present his strategy to fight so-called radicalization on October 2, 2020 in Les Mureaux outside Paris. Photo: Ludovic Marin/AFP/File photo.

Here we review some contradictory positions taken by French President Emmanuel Macron while dealing with the protests in France and Iran.

On Friday the Secretary General of Iran’s Judiciary Human Rights Office Kazem Qaribabadi denounced the double standards shown by Macron in his statements when, on the one hand, he commented on the ongoing protests in France and on the other hand, when he gave an opinion on the street riots that took place a few months ago in Iran, which were supported from abroad, following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini from underlying diseases while in police custody.

The French leader was one of the first Western leaders who openly supported the riots in Iran and incited social disorder in the name of so-called freedom of expression and assembly.

However, now that France is immersed in protests following the murder of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk, shot at point-blank range by an officer at a traffic checkpoint last Tuesday in Nanterre, on the outskirts of Paris, the French president is appealing for calm.

In an obvious double standard, the French and Western media define the protests in France as riots, unrest, subversion, rebellion and similar titles; however, they referred to the violent protests in Iran instigated by the West last fall, as peaceful demonstrations.

Despite supporting the wave of vandalism that destroyed hundreds of public properties in Iran, Macron condemned the so-called violence against institutions in France, calling it unjustifiable.

The French president blamed social media platforms for the protests in France and warned that he will restrict them to attempt to curb the protests. In comparison, the West, including France, lashed out at Iran for restrictions on the internet during the violent unrest and promised to facilitate access to the Iranian network to support the rioters.

On Friday, Macron announced the deployment of more police to suppress protests in France after deploying an unprecedented amount of law enforcement and armored vehicles in the streets of the country, whereas he labelled the Iranian authorities’ response to the unrest as repressive and, in that spirit, called for more sanctions against Tehran.

Police and riot police have arrested more than a thousand demonstrators in five consecutive days of mass protests against racism and police violence in France.

Instead of listening to the claims of the outraged, President Macron has accused the protesters of instrumentalizing Nahel’s death and points at social media platforms to stop the protests.

https://orinocotribune.com/macron-prote ... stifiable/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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