French protesters piled trash outside France’s Constitutional Court as anti-Macron riots in the country continue and the body prepared to rule on the legality of Macron’s retirement age reform.
Members of the French public are said to have barricaded the French Constitutional Court with trash on Thursday as others clashed with police on the country’s 12th day of Anti-Emmanuel Macron protests.
The court is expected to declare on Friday whether or not the French government’s pension reforms are legal, with many opposed to the Macron administration urging the court to shoot down the bill in its entirety.
According to a report by Euractiv, some of the 42,000 protesters marching in Paris used bins to blockade the entrances to the French court building, with footage of the riots depicting others as clashing with police.
PARIS, FRANCE – 2023/04/13: A protester walks past one of the rubbish bins set on fire during the demonstration. Citizens took to the streets to protest against pension reform in Paris. (Photo by Marco Cordone/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
The riot police arrest a protester during a demonstration on the 12th day of action after the government pushed a pensions reform through parliament without a vote, using the article 49.3 of the constitution, in Paris on April 13, 2023. France faced nationwide protests and strikes on April 13, 2023, to denounce the French government’s pension reform on the eve of a ruling from France’s Constitutional Council on the reform. (Photo by Jerome Gilles/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
France’s Interior Ministry has now banned protests outside the building until Saturday in an apparent attempt to keep the peace.
Protesters also reportedly targeted the country’s Central Bank offices, as well as the headquarters of LVMH, the company that owns the designer label Louis Vuitton.
Overall, some 380,000 people are thought to have taken part in Thursday’s demos across France protesting the Macron government.
However, while this remains a very large figure, it marks a considerable downward drift compared to the protests a number of weeks ago.
Just last week, over half-a-million marched in the country against Macron’s pension reforms, with this figure rising to 740,000 for one day in late March.
Even if Thursday’s day of protest does represent a winding down of the movement, the French President has not escaped the ordeal unscathed, with the pension reform scandal scarring his administration with infighting while only further bolstering his biggest opponents.
Although much of the sometimes violent protests in the country have been associated with France’s militant left, it is the country’s new right-wing that has benefitted most from the ordeal, with populist veteran Marine Le Pen in particular massively gaining in strength compared to her country’s head of state.
So large has the political shift in the country been that it is no longer clear if Macron and company could hold the presidency if another election was held tomorrow.
Despite losing to Macron by over 15 points in the run-off election last year, polling now estimates that Le Pen would comfortably beat the incumbent with a 10-point lead if a ballot was held tomorrow.
With the next actual Presidential election slated for 2027, Macron’s Renaissance party does still have time to turn things around, though will also have to do so without its Jupitarian leader, with the country’s legal system meaning that this second term in the Élysée for him will have to be his last.