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Paris Police Fire Tear Gas at Crowds Protesting Fuel Prices and Macron Tear Gas and Water Cannons in Paris as Grass-Roots Protest Takes Aim at Macron
(about 1 hour later)
PARIS — The police in Paris used tear gas and water cannons on Saturday to disperse protesters in “yellow vests” as thousands gathered in the capital and staged road blockades across the nation as part of a second wave of rallies against rising fuel taxes and Emmanuel Macron’s presidency. PARIS — Shouts of “Macron resign!” and “Macron get lost!” punctuated the booms from tear gas and water cannons on the Champs-Élysées on Saturday, as the French police forced protesters from the “Yellow Jackets” movement away from the presidential offices in the Élysée Palace.
Clashes broke out on the Champs-Élysées after the police set up security cordons around sensitive sites in the center of the capital. French protest movements come and go, but this one, organized on the internet, is different. Welling up rapidly from rural and forgotten France, this broad-based, citizen-driven movement is among the most serious challenges yet to President Emmanuel Macron’s pro-business government, say analysts, political opponents and even many of Mr. Macron’s supporters.
Some protesters sang the national anthem while others carried signs with slogans saying “Macron, resignation” and “Macron, thief,” according to news reports. Others were seen digging up cobbles or building barricades as the police confirmed the presence of several hard-line groups on one of the city’s best-known avenues. On Saturday, thousands of Yellow Jackets, wearing the fluorescent road-safety vests that all French drivers must carry in their vehicles, converged on Paris for a second weekend to protest a rise in fuel taxes and to express general discontent with the fiscal burden in one of the most highly taxed states in Europe, where taxes represent over 45 percent of G.D.P.
Thousands of police officers were deployed nationwide to contain the demonstrations, including a tense protest at the foot of the Champs-Élysées, where protesters wielded placards reading, “Death to Taxes,” and upturned a large vehicle. The numbers had dropped sharply from the preceding week’s 100,000 protesters; the police estimated there were about 8,000 in Paris on Saturday. But this time, more were concentrated on the protesters’ symbolic targets: the capital and Mr. Macron himself.
No one was injured in the clashes, but six were arrested for “throwing projectiles,” the Paris police said. Clouds of gas and smoke rolled up the Champs-Élysées all afternoon as the police battled hardened militants wielding paving stones; the grass-roots protesters insisted they were unconnected with their movement.
“It’s going to trigger a civil war, and me, like most other citizens, we’re all ready,” said Benjamin Vrignaud, a 21-year-old protester from Chartres. “We’re just fed up. It seems like to us that the government is only working to maintain its own privileges,” said Mathieu Styrna, one of the thousands marching down the Champs-Élysées. A contractor, he said he had been forced to drive hundreds of miles a week for work and could no longer afford his gas bills.
The Champs-Élysées was speckled in neon — owing to the color of the vests the myriad self-styled yellow jacket protesters wear. French drivers are required to keep neon security vests in their vehicles. For the protesters, it was all about making ends meet.
Five thousand protesters flooded the famed avenue, with 23,000 protesters total turning out nationwide so far, according to Interior Minister Christophe Castaner, who called for calm and promised tough police measures against unruly crowds. “Why should we have to finance their projects?” Mr. Styrna said, referring to the government’s plan to discourage car use through gas taxes. Many in the crowd said that they did not disdain the government’s environmental goals, but that their own survival was more important.
In a week of demonstrations that has dominated national news coverage, hundreds were injured and two people died in accidents stemming from the protests, which are posing a big challenge to Mr. Macron. The movement appears to be without leaders, and the opposition parties in France have scrambled to keep up with it.
Last Saturday, when nearly 300,000 people took part in the first yellow vest demonstrations countrywide, retailers’ daily revenue fell 35 percent, according to consumer groups. “This amateurism, it’s the sign of the crisis of the French political system,” said Dominique Reynié, a political scientist at Sciences Po, referring to the protesters’ loose organization.
The authorities are struggling because the movement has no clear leader and has attracted a motley group of people with broadly varying demands. The protesters call themselves the yellow jackets after the fluorescent security vests that drivers are required to keep in their vehicles. “It’s really quite incredible. This is the most impressive event since Macron came to power,” Mr. Reynié added. “It’s a profound crisis.”
A man caused a dramatic standoff with police officers on Friday when he donned a fluorescent vest and brandished an apparent grenade at a supermarket in the western city of Angers. He was later arrested. The movement has forced itself on the government’s unwilling attention with a message analysts say is not going away soon: We are in trouble.
While the movement, which has no leader, began as a backlash against higher fuel prices, it has tapped into broader frustration at the sense of a squeeze on household spending power under Mr. Macron’s 18-month-old government. Like many at the protest, Mr. Styrna, a father of three, said he had trouble paying his bills. “It’s not even by the end of the month; it’s by the middle,” he said, referring to point when the funds runs dry. “We don’t even go out any more — no cinema.”
The unrest is a dilemma for Mr. Macron who casts himself as a champion against climate change but has been derided as out of touch with common folk and is fighting a slump in popularity. Julien Viguerard, 31, who works in a biscuit factory in Toulouse, said: “The end of the month? Ha! It’s the 15th for me.”
Mr. Macron has defended the fuel taxes as necessary to reduce France’s dependence on fossil fuels, but he promised to lay out new plans on Tuesday to make the “energy transition” easier. He has seven children, earns €1,500 a month and is “sick of being taxed on everything.” The problem “is low salaries,” he said. “I’ve got children to feed. We’re not just imbeciles. They treat us like cattle. We can’t accept it.”
Since coming to power, he has seen off trade union and street demonstrations against his changes to the labor rules, and overhauled the heavily indebted state rail operator. Foreign investors have largely cheered his pro-business administration. Saturday’s protesters came from all over France. Many said they had been recruited on the internet, followed no political movement and emphasized that they simply didn’t have enough to live on.
But political foes have dismissed him as the “president of the rich” for ending a wealth tax, and voters appear to be growing restless, with the 40-year-old president’s popularity slumped at barely 20 percent. “I don’t have the means to live or to die,” read the sign held up by Jennifer Hurau, who works as an online saleswoman in the Paris suburbs on a temporary contract that is soon to end. For now, she makes 1600 euros a month — about $1,800 — and pays €550 in rent. “I don’t know what I will do,” she said.
It is the movement’s amorphousness that makes it new, powerful and potentially dangerous for Mr. Macron, analysts say.
“The government parties didn’t understand that their tax policies would wind up producing this,” said Mr. Reynié, the political scientist. “This is a movement that thinks the political parties are incapable of producing a solution. It is part of the chemistry of populism,” he added, pointing out that the tax burden had grown by about €25 billion every year between 2002 and 2017.
“This is the first time we’re seeing a mobilization that’s coming from the social networks, and not led by the political parties or the unions,” said Jean-Yves Camus, a political scientist who heads the Observatory on Political Radicalism.
“This is really a populist-type movement, and it’s an extremely strong protest against elite France,” he added. “It’s a protest against tax policy that’s considered confiscatory. And there’s been an undeniable drop in the buying power not just of the workers, but of the middle class.”
The government’s response to the protest movement so far has been halting, “a sort of condescension,” said Mr. Camus.
No high-ranking official has met with any of the self-designated spokespeople for the movement who have been appearing on French television all week. There have been a few small fiscal gestures — promises of checks and rebates — but these were dismissed by Saturday’s protesters as irrelevant to their daily struggle.
Mr. Macron, in a speech to some of the country’s thousands of mayors this week, did not mention the Yellow Jacket protests directly, but instead spoke in his usual finely sculpted abstractions.
“The challenge that is ours is to invent a new grammar,” the president said.
Later, in a question-and-answer session with the mayors, the president did address the protests, obliquely, and largely to complain about them.
“It’s a little bit unfair,” he said. “They see my face when they fill up at the gas pump.”
Mr. Macron added: “There is a moral crisis in society. The risk is in the ambient demagogy. I’m hearing the anger. But I don’t want to hear it in a demagogic fashion.”
Even some of the president’s own supporters in Parliament have expressed concern that the anger of the protesters is not being heard. Their own insurgent political movement was partly born of this anger, they said.
“They’re expressing a seething anger, which we know about,” said Thomas Mesnier, a parliamentary deputy in Mr. Macron’s party. “People are waiting for results, and they are waiting for their daily lives to improve.”
“This is a movement without precedent, and we don’t have a good diagnosis of it,” said Nicolas Démoulin, another Macronist deputy in Parliament. “We’ve got to go to these citizens who feel they are completely shut out of politics.”
The government declined to make its spokesman available for a response to the Yellow Jackets protest. On Friday, the spokesman, Benjamin Griveaux, told French television that “the crisis is deeper than just over the price of gas,” but “one must never set the environmental fight up against social justice.”
There was disappointment and bewilderment at Mr. Macron’s response to the protests at the giant annual French mayor’s convention in Paris this past week.
“The response has been out of step, disconnected,” said Sony Clinquart, the mayor of a small town near Dunkirk in the north.
“There is a lack of intermediary between him and the population,” said Isabelle Henniquau, the mayor of a town near the Swiss border. “He should explain what he is going to do.”
By Saturday afternoon, the Champs-Élysées was a battleground of overturned barricades, billowing smoke, bonfires and pushing between Yellow Jackets protesters and police.
“We’re hungry and we’re fed up,” said Jessica Monnier, 28, who works in a watch factory in the French Alps. She earns €970 a month, and said: “Once I pay my bills, I don’t have enough to eat. We’re just hungry, that’s all.”