French President Emmanuel Macron was heckled over his inability to govern his own country during an address at The Hague on Tuesday.
Following his controversial trip to Communist China, during which he raised eyebrows from Washington to Berlin after suggesting Europe should strategically separate itself from American foreign policy and even the U.S. dollar, President Macron continued his international tour with a state visit to The Netherlands on Tuesday.
While Macron perhaps wished to enjoy a brief respite from the chaotic and persistent protests dogging his administration at home, the French president’s speech at the Nexus Institute in the Amare theatre in The Hague was embarrassingly interrupted by activists who snuck into the building, Le Figaro reported.
Unfurling a banner over the balcony which read in English: “President of Violence and Hypocrisy”, the protesters heckled Macron with chants of “Where is French democracy?”, “You have millions of demonstrators in the streets,” and “The climate convention is not respected”.
Responding to the disruption, Macron said: “It is very important to have a social debate… this is a democracy and a democracy is exactly a place where we can demonstrate,” as the protesters were dragged off by guards.
“The day you say to yourself: ‘When I disagree with the law that has been adopted or the people who have been elected, I can do what I want because I myself decide the legitimacy of what I do’, you put democracy in danger,” he added.
The globalist leader has faced fury in France after his government used a constitutional loophole to push through his controversial pension reforms that would raise the retirement age from 62 to 64 years old without a vote in the National Assembly, which has been characterised by both the populist left and right as an affront to French democracy.
Commenting on the ongoing crisis after the protests, Mr Macron said that the citizens of his nation “should be less angry with me,” explaining that the retirement age “in many countries in Europe is much higher than 64 years.”
However, while the move to increase the pension age may have sparked the latest rounds of protests, the unrest in France is a result of far more than just the retirement issue. Over the past two years, France, like many other nations in Europe, has been struggling under crippling inflation as a result of the government-imposed lockdowns and other restrictions during the Chinese coronavirus crisis and the war in Ukraine.
The French have been particularly hard hit at the grocery store, with food inflation hitting 15 per cent over last year, resulting in one in four of the nation’s poorest people beginning to skip meals to make ends meet. Although the recent riots in Paris have drawn international attention, protests and labour union strikes began last autumn, as public workers demanded that the government raise their wages in line with inflation so that they could cope with the cost of living crisis.
Macron’s decision to focus on raising the pension age, rather than addressing the crippling economic realities faced by millions of citizens has largely been a confirmation that the World Economic Forum darling and former Rothschild banker is merely a “president of the rich“.
Macron, who early on in his presidency vowed to rule like a Jupiterean figure, has been at the forefront of calls to form a fully-fledged EU Army and has recently begun to stump for more “strategic autonomy” for Europe, presumably with Paris in the lead.
In a controversial interview on the plane home from China over the weekend, Macron argued that Europe should not “follow” the U.S. into a conflict with Beijing over Taiwan and even suggested a move away from the dollar as the world’s reserve currency — a key policy objective of both China and Russia.
Yet, the fact that the protests followed Macron to The Hague undermined the very mission he set out in the speech –namely coalescing European powers into a grand globalist “third superpower” — as his legitimacy as the de-facto head of Europe will likely be undermined if his rule is continued to be challenged at home by the French public.
Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka
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