The protest against the pension reform in France has invaded the entire social protest in the country and in recent days has led to violent acts that have pitted the government against opposition from the radical left.
While the Executive accuses politicians from that political spectrum of fueling violence against the forces of order, in the other camp they assure that it is the president, Emmanuel Macron, who with his statements exacerbates the most exacerbated and the Executive adds fuel to the fire. with disproportionate police deployments.
“Enough of the police violence”, assured the leftist leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon after the clashes that took place this Saturday between the forces of order and activists in the east of the country, in the middle of an environmental protest against the installation of artificial ponds for the agricultural irrigation.
The war scenes that took place in the middle of the countryside, with several gendarmerie vehicles set on fire by Molotov cocktails and two seriously injured, an agent and a protester, occurred hours after the day of union protests last Thursday against the pension reform will put an end to numerous incidents in several cities of the country.
Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin took direct aim at the extreme left as being behind these attacks and demanded that political leaders not justify them. “These violent attacks are inexcusable,” said the minister, who pointed to elements of the “ultra-left” as responsible for them, both on Thursday and Saturday.
The Executive has created a story according to which most of the protesters are peaceful, but groups of radicals are embedded in the protests whose sole purpose is to cause disorder and attack the security forces.
They claim to have identified some of the leaders of actions such as the burning of the Bordeaux City Hall entrance, an action that, in the Government’s opinion, shows that there is a clear institutional attack.
President Macron compared these violent acts with what happened in the United States Capitol or in the Brazilian Parliament, a comparison that greatly annoyed union officials and those of the extreme left.
“It’s a provocation,” said the leader of the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), Philippe Martinez, while Mélenchon accused the head of state of fueling the revolts. The scheme, according to them, was repeated this Saturday, when in front of the environmental demonstration the Government imposed an “excessive” deployment of 3,200 agents. Without that police barrier, Mélenchon maintains, “nothing more than a march through the countryside would have happened.”
The Executive reminded the leftist leader that on the eve of the protest knives, bats, concrete blocks and petanque balls ready to be thrown at the agents were seized, and that mortars and incendiary material were used during the protest.
A whole arsenal, according to the Government, which shows that their intentions were not peaceful and that their objective was clearly to confront the gendarmerie, as it happened. But the organizers of the demonstration insisted this Sunday that it was the agents who “shot first.”
The environmentalist MEP Benoît Biteau even assured that the agents prevented the organizers from assisting the injured, who are many more than the Government recognizes among its ranks. For this, they rely on a report from the Human Rights League, which was also at the protest this Saturday and which clearly points to police action.
An argument that is fed by the criticism launched by the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe, Dunja Mijatovic, who highlighted the “excessive use of force” during the demonstration last Thursday.
And with the leak in the press of some police actions and behavior of agents that have led the Paris Police Prefecture to open an internal investigation.
