The French have perhaps redefined the meaning of a candle-lit dinner, with a video that has gone viral on social media showing diners in an outdoor restaurant in Bordeaux sipping wine with a burning pile of garbage set ablaze in the background.
Wild scenes have gone viral on social media, with a video originally posted on Tik Tok showing a man and a woman apparently attempting to enjoy a romantic evening out at an outdoor restaurant in the Place de la Victoire, in Bordeaux last week, with a trash fire set off by protests burning just meters away from their table.
The video was filmed as nationwide riots erupted after French President Emmanuel Macron’s government used a constitutional trick to pass through his contentious pension reform plans — which would raise the retirement age from 62 to 64-years-old — through the National Assembly without a vote earlier this month.
In response to the move, millions of French citizens have poured out onto the streets to protest, while trade unions have enacted crippling worker strikes. One of the most visible results of the strikes has seen streets across the country littered with piles of trash as garbage collectors and trash incinerator workers walked off the job.
The buildup of trash in cities such as Bordeaux and Paris have literally been fuelling the nightly riots over the past two weeks, with radical agitators using the garbage as fuel for street fires. At one point, officials estimated that there was some 10,000 tonnes of trash lining the streets of Paris, alone.
While the CTG trade union confederation announced on Tuesday that they would be suspending the garbage collector strike, they warned that they will once again walk off the job if President Macron continues to withdraw the pension reforms.
Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka
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