Anti-austerity strikes and protests grip France

By AURELIEN BREEDEN and CATHERINE PORTER

Big anti-austerity street marches and labor strikes gripped France on Thursday, raising the pressure faced by Sébastien Lecornu, the country’s new prime minister, as he tries to pass a debt-reducing budget by the end of the year.

Railway workers, students, civil servants and others joined protests organized by labor unions to oppose the plans of François Bayrou, Lecornu’s predecessor, to cut 44 billion euros, nearly $52 billion, from next year’s state budget. France’s Interior Ministry said over 500,000 people had attended the protests; one of the leading labor unions put the figure at over 1 million.

Bayrou was ousted by lawmakers last week, and President Emmanuel Macron replaced him with Lecornu, a centrist and an ally.

But it was not immediately clear whether Lecornu, who had promised a “break” with the past, would scrap his predecessor’s plans or use them as a basis for lawmakers to amend, and the concern over looming budget cuts has persisted.

“The budget that was imposed on us by the last prime minister — and the new one will be the same — was one of austerity,” said Cécilia Rapine, an archaeologist from Normandy who was hoisting an orange union flag at the march in Paris as protesters waved smoke bombs and danced to music blaring from trucks.

Rapine said she understood that France’s precarious finances needed fixing. But she worried that schools and hospitals would bear the brunt after years of business-friendly tax breaks that she said had deprived the state of funding.

“Austerity gives no hope,” Rapine said, as orange smoke wafted over her head. “It creates more cracks in society.”

Labor unions say that anything resembling Bayrou’s budget — which, among other measures, proposed to freeze welfare payments at their current level — would place an unacceptable burden on lower- and middle-class workers. The unions want higher taxes on wealthy individuals and big business, more funding of public services and a reversal of Macron’s increase in the legal retirement age.

“Today we are sending the government a very clear warning,” Marylise Léon, leader of the French Democratic Confederation of Labor, the country’s largest union, told reporters at the march in Paris. “The budget cannot be built solely on the back of workers.”

In Paris, many metro lines were running only during rush hour. Traffic was disrupted on regional train lines but mostly normal on the country’s high-speed rail route. Unions estimated that about a third of elementary-school teachers and 45% of middle and high school teachers were striking, though the Education Ministry cited lower figures.

Parts of the Louvre Museum were closed, and the Eiffel Tower shut down.