Thousands protest across France after Macron rejects left’s demands

Thousands of protesters took to the streets across France on Saturday after President Emmanuel Macron rejected the French left’s demands on forming a government and instead appointed conservative veteran Michel Barnier as prime minister.

The call to protest came from left-wing groups, who did so before Barnier’s nomination but after Macron officially decided not to appoint Lucie Castets, the prime ministerial candidate of the pan-left New Popular Front alliance. Macron argued that Castets would not survive an immediate vote of no confidence, but demonstration organizers have described Macron’s decision as a “coup de force.”

Protests took place in Paris as well as other cities including Nantes in the west, Nice and Marseille in the south, and Strasbourg in the east. In Paris, protesters gathered at Place de la Bastille and tensions ran high as police prepared for potential clashes, according to media reports.

The leftist alliance secured a surprise victory in France’s snap elections, which Macron called after the far right’s triumph in the European elections in June. Despite finishing first, however, the New Popular Front fell far short of an absolute majority.

The French Greens, the Communists and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Unbowed movement all called on their supporters to join the protests. The Socialist Party is the only one of the alliance’s four main members that chose not to participate.

At the head of the Parisian procession, Melenchon spoke passionately, declaring that “the French people are in rebellion. They have entered into revolution.”

“There will be no pause, no truce. I call you to a long-term battle,” he added.

Several of the organizers claimed the impressive number of 160,000 protesters in Paris on Saturday, with a total of 300,000 in all of France. But Paris authorities estimated that only 26,000 demonstrators marched in the French capital. The daily Le Monde pointed out that police and organizers have different methods of counting the number of participants, saying the margin of error, according to a company using cameras, could be as high as 30 percent to 40 percent.

All four left-wing forces within the New Popular Front, which control 193 of the 577 seats in the French National Assembly, have announced plans to vote for a motion of no confidence against Barnier’s government.

Barnier, a former European commissioner and Brexit negotiator, is not a member of a pro-Macron party but of the conservative Les Républicains, which netted less than 7 percent of the vote in the first round of the French snap elections.

While Barnier can count on support from pro-Macron forces and from Les Républicains, the durability of his government will likely depend on the far-right National Rally’s tacit support.

Koen Verhelst contributed reporting.