16-year-old Milia made her own poster: “Macron, you traitor, leave us our pension,” it says. It doesn’t matter whether or not President Emmanuel Macron pushes through his most important reform project, raising the retirement age from 62 to 64, Milia is still decades away from her retirement age. Macron’s pension reform still infuriates her.
“It’s about our future,” argues Milia. Like many others, she decided to take part in the demonstration this Tuesday when the government punched through the reform in mid-March using controversial article 49.3 of the constitution without a vote in parliament. “It’s not a democracy anymore,” complains the 16-year-old.
High proportion of young people
However, the clashes with the security forces at the rallies worried her, she says. “France is a free country, I don’t want to get tear gas just because I’m going to demonstrate.” Experts estimate that the proportion of young people in the demonstration on Tuesday was two to three times greater than on the previous days of action. This is probably also due to the security forces, who have come under criticism for their brutal use of force during the most recent demonstrations.
“Police violence scares us. But it’s one more reason to be here,” says Clémentine. “If we stayed at home because of that, they would have won,” adds the 20-year-old biology student, who, like Milia, does not want to give her last name.
Allusion to the revolt of an earlier generation
Then she resolutely lifts her poster up. It reads: “If you come to us with 49.3, we’ll come to you with May 68” – an allusion to the revolt of an earlier generation of students in France. Political scientist and police expert Fabien Jobard also considers the security forces’ strategy to be risky: “They respond to violence with violence and don’t care about collateral damage,” he said. This leads to the protest becoming more radical.
The so-called black bloc, as the hard core of the rioters is called, is particularly dangerous because of the dynamics triggered by the tough actions of the security forces, Jobard warns. This “inevitably leads to escalation”: “Young people who get tear gas and experience aggressive behavior from the police then react like the supporters of the ‘Black Block’ and also start throwing stones.”
Shock grenades and hard rubber bullets
Within a few minutes, the number of violent demonstrators could then rise from a few hundred to a few thousand. Jobard criticizes the fact that the French security forces are also using means that have long been banned in demonstrations in other countries, such as shock grenades and hard rubber bullets.
As a typical example, the political scientist cites the riots last weekend in Sainte-Soline in western France. There, a demonstration against an ecologically questionable water project ended in violence and chaos.
No end in sight
According to official information, around a thousand violent demonstrators had arrived, armed with firecrackers and Molotov cocktails. To keep them in check, 3,200 security forces were deployed – with quad bikes, helicopters and water cannons. About 4000 tear gas and shock grenades were fired. Two seriously injured protesters are still in a coma.
In Paris, too, supporters of the black bloc were among the demonstrators again on Tuesday. The first riots broke out in the late afternoon, in which rubbish bins went up in flames and a supermarket was looted. The police reported numerous arrests. France still seems a long way from a “calming down of the situation”, as Macron has been invoking for days.
