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09-09-2024
PARIS: More than 100,000 people protested across France on Saturday against the appointment of the centre-right politician Michel Barnier as the new prime minister.
His appointment follows an inconclusive election in which the left-wing bloc, the New Popular Front (NPF) won the largest number of seats.
The protests were called by trade unions and members of the NPF, who are furious that their own candidate for prime minister was rejected by President Emmanuel Macron.
Barnier, the EU’s former Brexit negotiator, said he is open to forming a government with politicians across the political spectrum, including the left.
The interior ministry said 110,000 protested nationwide on Saturday, including 26,000 in Paris, though one protest leader claimed the figure was 300,000.
Jean-Luc Melenchon, a veteran firebrand from the radical France Unbowed party, called for the “most powerful mobilization possible” in national marches.
Around 130 protests were scheduled, with the biggest setting out from central Paris on Saturday afternoon.
Melenchon joined the Paris protest, giving a speech on the back of a float emblazoned with the slogan: “For democracy, stop Macron’s coup”.
The demonstrators are also using slogans such as “denial of democracy” and “stolen election”.
Parties on the left are angry that their own candidate for Prime Minister, Lucie Castets, was rejected by Macron, who said she had no chance of surviving a vote of confidence in the National Assembly.
Barnier may be able to survive a confidence vote because the far right, which also won a large number of seats, has said it won’t automatically vote against him.
That has led to criticism that his government will be dependent on the far right.
“We have a prime minister completely dependent on National Rally,” Ms Castets said.
Barnier spent Saturday afternoon visiting a children’s hospital in Paris, where he highlighted the importance of public services, but told healthcare workers his government “is not going to perform miracles”, local broadcaster BFMTV reported.
Against the backdrop of the protests, the new PM is focused on forming a new government.
After talks with the leaders of the right-wing Republicans and the president’s centrist Ensemble group, he said discussions were going very well and were “full of energy”.
Some on the left have blamed themselves for ending up with Barnier as prime minister. Socialist Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo pointed out that the president had considered former Socialist Prime Minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, for the job but that he had been turned down by his own party.
Another Socialist Mayor, Karim Bouamrane, blamed intransigence from other parts of the left alliance: “The path they chose was 100% or nothing and here we are with nothing.” The drama and vitriol of France’s sudden summer election is over. Now comes the drama and vitriol of stage two and what could be a much longer and equally agitated struggle to build a functional coalition out of the inconclusive results of Saturday’s vote.
“A lot of things are unclear. We know who lost but we don’t know who won. Can we learn the art of compromise which is so unusual for us? Nobody knows, the signs are not necessarily good,” Sylvie Kauffmann, a newspaper columnist for Le Monde, told me. The risks of deadlock for France itself, for its constitutional order, for European stability, and even for Ukraine’s war against Russian aggression are serious. (Int’l News Desk)
