Tag Archives: Macron

Protest in France continues as 500,000 take to the streets

Revelations 6:4 “And out came another horse, bright red. Its rider was permitted to take peace from the earth, so that people should slay one another, and he was given a great sword.”

Important Takeaways:

  • France on Fire: Over Half a Million Protest Against Macron Government
  • Over half a million people took to the streets of France on Thursday to protest Emmanuel Macron’s government.
  • The demonstrations are mostly concerned with unpopular pension reforms pushed through by the government, which utilized a loophole within the French constitution to implement an increase to the pension age without the approval of parliament.
  • This has prompted a huge degree of anger in the country, with political opposition on both the left and right up in arms about the current ordeal.
  • Another target for protesters was the Paris headquarters of various major financial institutions, including the infamous BlackRock investment firm, all the while chanting Antifa slogans.
  • Meanwhile, problems the country is having with fuel shortages at gas stations appear to be slowly resolving themselves, though supply will remain scarce at many stations over the Easter weekend.
  • That is not to say that Macron has escaped the crisis scot-free.

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Millions protesting in France as Government tries to push thru Bill without a Vote

Anti-government protesters

Revelations 6:4 “And out came another horse, bright red. Its rider was permitted to take peace from the earth, so that people should slay one another, and he was given a great sword.”

Important Takeaways:

  • France protests: Thousands of police deployed as protesters march against pension reforms
  • Protesters blocked train tracks and highways and clashed with police in some French cities on Tuesday as they marched across the country against President Emmanuel Macron’s deeply unpopular pension bill.
  • Earlier in the day, the government rejected a new demand by unions to suspend and rethink the pension bill, which will bring the retirement age from 62 up to 64, infuriating labor leaders who said the government must find a way out of the crisis.
  • Millions of people have been demonstrating and joining strike action since mid-January to show their opposition to the bill. But public frustration has evolved into broader anti-Macron sentiment.
  • In particular, the protests have intensified since the government used special powers to push the bill through parliament without a vote.

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French citizens protest in the street as lower parliament push Vote of No Confidence as social security program looks to go bust

Revelations 6:4 “And out came another horse, bright red. Its rider was permitted to take peace from the earth, so that people should slay one another, and he was given a great sword.”

Important Takeaways:

  • Macron’s government faces vote of no confidence after pushing up retirement age
  • French President Emanuel Macron looks to change the retirement age from 62 to 64
  • Days of protests turned violent and prompted hundreds of arrests after Macron and Borne bypassed the parliament Thursday to raise the pension age by two years in what French leadership has argued is necessary to keep its social security program from going bust.
  • The Senate, which has a conservative majority, backed the changes to the retirement plan and passed the legislation last week.
  • If the vote of no-confidence fails, the bill will become law.
  • If the motions pass, Borne will be forced to resign and Macron’s presidency will likely be marred by the incident through his tenure which will conclude in 2027.

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France takes a weak stance suggesting it won’t use nukes if Russia uses them in Ukraine

Revelations 6:3-4 “when he opened the second seal, I heard the second living creature say, “Come!” 4 And out came another horse, bright red. Its rider was permitted to take peace from the earth, so that people should slay one another, and he was given a great sword.

Important Takeaways:

  • France’s Macron suggests he won’t fire nukes at Russia even if Putin uses them in Ukraine, undercutting Western threats
  • Macron, in a TV interview Wednesday night, gave a long and sometimes-ambiguous discussion of how France might react if Vladimir Putin’s threats to use nuclear force were to come true.
  • His answer, to the France 2 network, suggested that such an event may fall short of France’s own threshold for striking back.
  • The position was at odds with a much firmer statement by G7 countries Monday, in which France and other nations warned of “severe consequences” to the Russian use of nuclear weapons.

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In France: If you don’t lower the temperature of your home Government Energy Rationing will come

Revelations 18:23 ‘For the merchants were the great men of the earth; for by thy sorceries were all nations deceived.’

Important Takeaways:

  • Running Out of Ideas: Macron Pleads with French to Use Less Energy to Avoid Rationing
  • According to a report by Le Figaro, Macron has once again urged “sobriety” from his country’s population, saying that individual efforts to use less energy could translate to rationing being unnecessary over the coming months.
  • “The solution is in our hands,” Macron is reported as telling the public, pleading that individuals reduce their energy consumption by “putting the air conditioning a little less strong” and “the heating a little less strong than usual”.
  • He specifically called on French households to voluntarily limit their home heating to 19 degrees over the coming winter period, something the French President appears to hope will “save about 10 per cent of what we usually consume”

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Putin accuses West of ‘complete disregard for our concerns’ hours after Macron talks

Matthew 24:6 You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come.

Important Takeaways:

  • Vladimir Putin warns a nuclear war could break out if Ukraine joins NATO and accuses West of ‘complete disregard for our concerns’ hours after Macron talks
  • French officials are touting the talks as a success and claim that they have won concessions from Putin with a promise not to ‘escalate’ his troop buildup.
  • Putin claimed his Moscow talks with President Emmanuel Macron were constructive but said:
    • ‘I want to stress it one more time, I’ve been saying it, but I’d very much want you to finally hear me, and to deliver it to your audience in print, TV and online.
    • ‘Do you understand it or not, that if Ukraine joins NATO and attempts to bring Crimea back by military means, the European countries will be automatically pulled into a war conflict with Russia?’
    • Putin warned: ‘Of course the [military] potential of NATO and Russia are incomparable. We understand it.
    • ‘But we also understand that Russia is one of the leading nuclear states, and by some modern components it even outperforms many.
    • ‘There will be no winners. And you will be pulled into this conflict against your will.
    • ‘You won’t even have time to blink your eye when you execute Article 5 (collective defense of NATO members [means that )…. [an attack against one Ally is considered as an attack against all Allies]
    • ‘Mr. President Macron, of course, doesn’t want this. And I don’t want it. And I don’t want it….which is why he is here, torturing me for six straight hours.’

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Macron, in Israel for Holocaust memorial, warns of ‘dark shadow’ of anti-Semitism

By John Irish

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – President Emmanuel Macron said on Thursday France was determined to combat the hatred and intolerance that have fueled a sharp rise in anti-Semitism in his country as he met Holocaust survivors during a visit to Israel.

Macron is one of dozens of world leaders attending events at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial center in Jerusalem to mark the 75-year anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp.

“The dark shadow of anti-Semitism is being reborn,” Macron told members of the roughly 100,000 French-Israeli citizens.

“Anti-Semitism is back. It is here and its cortege of intolerance and hate is here. France won’t accept.”

“I responded to the call to come to Yad Vashem to say this shall never happen again. It’s a battle that is never won,” Macron said. “My determination to act on this is total.”

Earlier on Thursday, Macron met French survivors of the Holocaust at a memorial near Jerusalem to some 76,000 Jews who were arrested in France during World War Two and transported in terrible conditions in railway boxcars to death camps such as Auschwitz, where most died.

In 1995 France’s then-president, Jacques Chirac, officially acknowledged for the first time French complicity in the wartime deportations. But it was only in 2009 that France’s highest court recognized the state’s responsibility.

A survey published on Tuesday by French think-tank Fondapol and the American Jewish Committee found that 70 percent of Jews living in France today had been victims of anti-Semitism.

France has Europe’s biggest Jewish community – around 550,000 – and anti-Semitic acts have risen by 70 percent in each of the last two years. More than 500 were reported in 2018 alone.

Last month, scores of Jewish graves were found desecrated in a cemetery in eastern France, hours before lawmakers adopted a resolution equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.

“UNCERTAIN FUTURE”

Commentators have blamed the surge in anti-Semitic attacks on incitement by Islamist preachers, others on the rise of anti-Zionism – opposition to the existence of Israel as a homeland for the Jewish people.

Macron and the French survivors of the Holocaust were joined by young college students at a solemn ceremony at the Roglit memorial, west of Jerusalem, to remember the French Jews deported between 1942-1944.

Serge Klarsfeld, an 84-year-old Nazi hunter, welcomed the participation of Macron and the young people in the ceremony.

“Your presence today with the education minister and the children from the banlieues (suburbs) who are bravely engaged in studying the Shoah and drawing the consequences touches us deeply and allows us to look with hope toward an uncertain future,” said Klarsfeld.

(Reporting by John Irish; Editing by Gareth Jones)

French unions take to streets in make-or-break pension protest

By Elizabeth Pineau and Sophie Louet

PARIS (Reuters) – French trade unions disrupted rail services, cut power output and brought demonstrators onto the streets in cities across France on Thursday in a make-or-break push to force President Emmanuel Macron to abandon his planned pension reform.

The country’s hard-left unions rallied supporters hoping to regain momentum at a time participation in a 36-day long public sector strike wanes and opinion polls show public backing for the industrial action dropping.

Police fired teargas at protesters in Nantes, western France, and in Paris, where demonstrators hurled projectiles at officers in brief skirmishes and trailed smoke flares.

“Nothing is lost. The ball is in the government’s camp. Either they listen, or they govern against the people’s will,” hardline CGT union boss Philippe Martinez told reporters. “I am sceptical about the government’s willingness to talk.”

Former investment banker Macron wants to streamline France’s unwieldy pension system and incentivise the French to stay in work longer to pay for some of the most generous retirement benefits in the industrialised world.

The proposed reform would be the biggest overhaul of the system since World War Two and is central to the president’s drive to make the French labour force more flexible and more competitive globally.

He says the myriad special benefits handed out to different types of worker deter mobility within the job market, especially within the public sector.

If Macron succeeds in defeating the unions – he has already stared them down over reform of state-run SNCF railways and an easing of labour laws – he will strengthen his hand to embark on further pro-business reforms as he eyes re-election in 2022.

The strike has hit transport in Paris the hardest and commuters on Thursday again grappled with skeleton services on suburban and metro lines. Power sector walkouts saw electricity production fall by about a 10th.

PUBLIC SERVICES

Rail workers and teachers, lawyers and nurses railed against a president they accuse of turning a deaf ear to the street. Some waved banners reading “Day 36 and we aren’t giving up”; others collected donations to help compensate striking workers for lost salaries.

French employees receive pensions through a system divided into dozens of separate schemes. Macron wants a single “points” system to treat contributions from all workers from the public and private sectors equally.

Public sector unions argue this amounts to an attack on hard-earned benefits that help compensate for salaries below those in the private sector.

“This reform would herald the end of public services in France,” lamented teacher Antoine Rouilly in the southwestern city of Toulouse. “If there are no retirement perks, there’s no reason to stay in the public sector.”

While the strikes are the longest running in decades, they have failed to paralyse France in the way achieved by a wave of industrial action in 1995 that forced a government U-turn from which the prime minister never recovered.

Nonetheless, in the first pointer on the strike’s impact economic sentiment, consumer confidence fell sharply in December and retailers, hoteliers and restaurateurs complain of a sharp fall in revenue.

The government’s strategy is to pick off individual sectors with bespoke concessions, raising questions over prospects for ending up with a single system, and seek a compromise with the reform-minded CFDT union.

The CFDT opposes the government’s plan to financially penalise people who stop working before 64, two years later than the legal retirement age. Winning the CFDT’s support is key to the government ending the stalemate.

Lawmakers close to Macron have suggested the extended retirement age could be a temporary measure if another way of balancing the pension budget can be balanced.

(Additional reporting by Bate Felix, Christian Lowe, Richard Lough and Michel Rose in Paris and Johanna Decorse in Toulouse; Writing by Richard Lough; Editing by Alison Williams)

French police fire tear gas at strikers challenging Macron reform

By Sybille de La Hamaide and Marine Pennetier

PARIS (Reuters) – Police fired tear gas at protesters in the center of Paris on Thursday and public transport ground to a near halt in one of the biggest strikes in France for decades, aimed at forcing President Emmanuel Macron to ditch a planned reform of pensions.

The strike pits Macron, a 41-year-old former investment banker who came to power in 2017 on a promise to open up France’s highly regulated economy, against powerful trade unions who say he is set on dismantling worker protections.

The outcome depends on who blinks first – the unions who risk losing public support if the disruption goes on for too long, or the government which fears voters could side with the unions and blame officials for the standoff.

“People can work around it today and tomorrow, but next week people may get annoyed,” said 56-year-old cafe owner Isabelle Guibal.

Rail workers voted to extend their strike through Friday, while labor unions at the Paris bus and metro operator RATP said their walkout would continue until Monday.

Trade unions achieved their initial objective on Thursday, as workers at transport enterprises, schools and hospitals across France joined the strike. In Paris, commuters had to dust off old bicycles, rely on car pooling apps, or just stay at home. The Eiffel Tower had to close to visitors.

On Thursday afternoon, tens of thousands of union members marched through the center of the capital in a show of force.

Trouble erupted away from the main protest when people in masks and dressed in black ransacked a bus stop near the Place de la Republique, ripped up street furniture, smashed shop windows and threw fireworks at police.

Police in riot gear responded by firing tear gas, Reuters witnesses said. Nearby, police used truncheons to defend themselves from black-clad protesters who rushed at them. Prosecutors said, in all, 57 people were detained.

Macron wants to simplify France’s unwieldy pension system, which comprises more than 40 different plans, many with different retirement ages and benefits. Rail workers, mariners and Paris Opera House ballet dancers can retire up to a decade earlier than the average worker.

Macron says the system is unfair and too costly. He wants a single, points-based system under which for each euro contributed, every pensioner has equal rights.

PRESIDENT’S SWAGGER

Macron has already survived one major challenge to his rule, from the grassroots “Yellow Vest” protesters who earlier this year clashed with police and blocked roads around France for weeks on end.

Having emerged from that crisis, he carries himself with a swagger on the world stage, publicly upbraiding U.S. President Donald Trump this week over his approach to the NATO alliance and counter-terrorism.

But the pension reform – on which polls show French people evenly split between supporters and opponents – is fraught with risk for him as it chips away at social protections many in France believe are at the heart of their national identity.

“People are spoiling for a fight,” Christian Grolier, a senior official from the hard-left Force Ouvriere union which is helping organize the strike, told Reuters.

The SNCF state railway said only one in 10 high-speed TGV trains would run and police reported power cables on the line linking Paris and the Riviera had been vandalized. The civil aviation authority asked airlines to cancel 20% of flights because of knock-on effects from the strike.

Past attempts at pension reform have ended badly for the authorities. Former president Jacques Chirac’s conservative government in 1995 caved into union demands after weeks of crippling protests.

(Reporting by Caroline Pailliez, Geert de Clercq, Sybille de La Hamaide, Marine Pennetier, Laurence Frost in paris and Guillaume Frouin in Nantes; Writing by Richard Lough and Christian Lowe; Editing by Gareth Jones)

‘Nasty’, ‘two-faced’, ‘brain dead’: NATO pulls off summit despite insults

By Robin Emmott and Andreas Rinke

WATFORD, England (Reuters) – NATO leaders set aside public insults ranging from “delinquent” to “brain dead” on Wednesday, declaring at a 70th anniversary summit they would stand together against a common threat from Russia and prepare for China’s rise.

Officials insisted the summit was a success: notably, Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan backed off from an apparent threat to block plans to defend northern and eastern Europe unless allies declared Kurdish fighters in Syria terrorists.

But the meeting began and ended in acrimony startling even for the era of U.S. President Donald Trump, who arrived declaring the French president “nasty” and left calling Canada’s prime minister “two-faced” for mocking him on a hot mic.

“We have been able to overcome our disagreements and continue to deliver on our core tasks to protect and defend each other,” NATO’s ever-optimistic Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told a news conference.

In a joint declaration, the leaders said: “Russia’s aggressive actions constitute a threat to Euro-Atlantic security; terrorism in all its forms and manifestations remains a persistent threat to us all.”

The half-day summit at a golf resort on the outskirts of London was always going to be tricky, with officials hoping to avoid acrimony that burst forth at their meeting last year when Trump complained about allies failing to bear the burden of collective security.

But this year’s meeting was made even more difficult by Erdogan, who launched an incursion into Syria and bought Russian missiles against the objections of his allies, and by French President Emmanuel Macron, who had described the alliance’s strategy as brain dead in an interview last month.

In public it seemed to go worse than expected, beginning on Tuesday when Trump called Macron’s remarks “very, very nasty” and described allies who spend too little on defense as “delinquents” — a term officials said Trump used again on Wednesday behind closed doors during the summit itself.

At a Buckingham Palace reception on Tuesday evening, Canada’s Justin Trudeau was caught on camera with Macron, Britain’s Boris Johnson and Mark Rutte of the Netherlands, laughing at Trump’s long press appearances. “You just watched his team’s jaws drop to the floor,” said Trudeau.

By the time the summit wound up on Wednesday, Trump had decided not to hold a final press conference, saying he had already said enough. “He’s two-faced,” Trump said of Trudeau.

HUAWEI SECURITY RISK

Nevertheless, officials said important decisions were reached, including an agreement to ensure the security of communications, including new 5G mobile phone networks. The United States wants allies to ban equipment from the world’s biggest telecoms gear maker, Chinese firm Huawei.

“I do think it’s a security risk, it’s a security danger,” Trump said in response to a question on Huawei, although the leaders’ declaration did not refer to the company by name.

“I spoke to Italy and they look like they are not going to go forward with that. I spoke to other countries, they are not going to go forward,” he said of contracts with Huawei.

Ahead of the summit, Johnson — the British host who faces an election next week and chose to avoid making any public appearances with Trump — appealed for unity.

“Clearly it is very important that the alliance stays together,” he said. “But there is far, far more that unites us than divides us.”

Macron held his ground over his earlier criticism of NATO’s strategy, saying as he arrived that it was important for leaders to discuss issues in an open and forthright manner if they were to find solutions.

“I think it’s our responsibility to raise differences that could be damaging and have a real strategic debate,” he said. “It has started, so I am satisfied.”

One of Macron’s chief complaints is that Turkey, a NATO member since 1952 and a critical ally in the Middle East, has increasingly acted unilaterally, launching its incursion in Syria and buying Russian S-400 anti-aircraft missiles.

In his comments to the press, Stoltenberg said that while Russia was a threat, NATO also wanted to ensure a constructive dialogue with it. He added, in a reference to Turkey, that the S-400 system was in no way compatible with NATO’s defense.

At the summit, Europe, Turkey and Canada pledged to spend an extra $400 billion on defense by 2024, responding to Trump’s accusations that they spend too little. Germany, a frequent target of Trump’s blandishments, has promised to spend 2% of national output by 2031.

France and Germany also won backing for a strategic review of NATO’s mission, with the alliance set to establish a “wise persons” group to study how the organization needs to reposition for the future. That could involve shifting its posture away from the East and toward threats in the Middle East and Africa.

(Additional reporting by Andreas Rinke, John Chalmers and Johnny Cotton in Watford, and Estelle Shirbon in London; Writing by Luke Baker; Editing by John Chalmers and Peter Graff)