French strikes: ‘I’ve never seen anything like it’ – but guess what happened next …

Pam Barker | Director of TLB Europe Reloaded Project

I’m taking the opportunity to publish a couple of reports of Thursday’s huge strike across France in opposition to Macron’s neoliberal attack on public services in case it vanishes from the radar. According to TheLocal.fr:

Seven unions representing staff in the public sector led strikes and protests, and a third of railway workers walked out to join the demonstrations against 40-year-old Macron’s bid to shake up the French state.

Around 200,000 people demonstrated nationwide, according to police figures, including 49,000 in Paris. The CGT union, the biggest in the public sector, estimated the total turnout at over half a million.

Train services and flights were disrupted and many schools closed their doors for the day. Protests typically turned violent in places as they are wont to do here. And this from the New York Times:

“This is a wake-up call for the government,” said Laurent Berger, the secretary general of the second-largest railway union. He said the government needed to have real discussions with the unions before “everything falls apart.”

More than 200,000 workers and students joined in protests around the country, about 48,000 of them in Paris, according to a consortium of journalism organizations that hired a company to estimate crowd sizes to avoid relying on police estimates.

The student presence in Thursday’s strike was an echo of France’s historic protests of 1968, which were led by students and began on the same day, March 22, 50 years ago. Those strikes started in French universities and were quickly joined by union members and others, bringing the country to a standstill and forcing reforms in many sectors.

It’s been a busy week all in all. Tuesday was noteworthy for the sight of former President Nicolas Sarkozy being held by police for 2 days for questioning over longstanding suspicions of illegal campaign financing from Muammar Gaddafi; he was then finally charged.

Friday saw a false flag – sorry, I mean terrorist attack – in the middle of nowhere in the south of France around Carcassonne. Radouane Lakdim, apparently a member of ISIS, killed the driver of a car in the wee hours, wounding its passenger, then stole the car to drive later in the morning to a military police barracks where he wounded an officer jogging on the street. He later took refuge in the local SuperU supermarket (pictured) where he took hostages and killed two more people; a police officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Arnaud Beltrame, was taken at his own request in exchange for another hostage. Beltrame was subsequently shot, to die later of his wounds, and the ISIS member was killed. Lakdim was known to the authorities as they usually are, shouted Allahu Akbar right on cue, and then died. A familiar script.

Friday.

Rolling TV news was naturally full of it, including paeans of praise for the officer who sacrificed himself, as well as an opportunity for Macron to come on TV looking presidential in a crisis, flanked by his older looking PM, Edouard Philippe, for a little gravitas. Which all prompted me to wonder why this attack had just happened. We hadn’t had an election, which is often the reason for these attacks to mushroom. Then of course it hit me that the day before had seen France’s biggest, violent strikes in some time, headlined in the rolling news as the first big test of Macron. First suspicious sign.

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