King Charles cancels Paris visit as riots turn French cities into battlegrounds
French President Emmanuel Macron says his government wants talks with unions on a wide range of issues amid anger over his pension reforms. Photo: Getty
The state visit of King Charles to France will be postponed amid tensions over pension reform, the French Presidency says.
The French and British governments took the decision following a phone call between President Emmanuel Macron and the King, the statement said.
Black-clad anarchists fought street battles with police for several hours in the French capital on Thursday, ransacking a McDonald’s restaurant, smashing up bus shelters and setting alight mounds of garbage that have piled up during strikes.
In Bordeaux, at the heart of one of France’s best-known wine-growing areas and where King Charles was also expected to visit, protesters set alight the entrance to the city hall.
Trade unions had said they would not let up in their struggle to force President Emmanuel Macron into a u-turn on raising the retirement age by two years to 64.
The next day of nationwide street protests was planned for Tuesday – during King Charles’ visit.
The visit would have been Charles’s first since becoming monarch.
Macron had hoped King Charles’s visit would mark a symbolic step in the two countries’ efforts to turn a page after years of poor relations in the post-Brexit era.
The royal visit was to have included events at the Musee d’Orsay art gallery and Arc de Triomphe monument, as well as a state banquet, before the king travelled to Bordeaux by train.
A ‘gift’ to rioters
Bordeaux Mayor Pierre Hurmic said earlier cancelling the King’s visit to Bordeaux would only spur the anarchists on.
“Cancel King Charles’s visit to Bordeaux? I do not wish to make that gift to rioters,” he said.
President Emmanuel Macron is under pressure to find a way out of a crisis that has seen some of France’s worst street violence in years, all driven by a pension bill he has pushed through parliament without a vote.
In Paris and many cities across the country, clean-up crews sifted through broken glass, charred garbage cans and shattered bus stops after the latest violent clashes between black-clad anarchists and police.
Some 441 police officers were injured and 475 people were arrested.
Dozens of protesters were also injured, including a woman who lost a thumb in the Normandy town of Rouen.
The protest rallies that gathered large crowds throughout the day were otherwise largely peaceful.
Opinion polls show a wide majority of voters are opposed to delaying retirement age by two years to 64, which is what the pension bill stipulates.
Protesters were further angered by the government deciding to skip the vote in parliament.
On a shattered Starbucks window, someone had tagged “Democracy” in big red letters.
Other tags seen on burnt down newspaper kiosks and damaged shop windows read “anti-Macron” and “Macron, resign”.
“Everybody is worried this morning because there has been unacceptable violence,” the head of the CFDT labour union Laurent Berger told RTL radio, urging Macron to step in.
“We need to calm things down before there is a tragedy,” he said.
“To find a way out, we need the government and the president to make a gesture.”
Six-month solution?
The solution, the influential Berger said, would be to put the reform, which pushes the retirement age by two years to 64, on pause for six months and look for compromises.
In a TV interview on Wednesday, Macron said he would not withdraw the law and that it would proceed as planned and enter into force by year’s end.
On Friday, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin told CNews TV that Macron was “worried for the country” because of the street violence and gave no sign of him changing tack.
Fuel shipments resumed early Friday from TotalEnergies TTEF.PA Gonfreville refinery in Normandy after police intervened to disperse refinery workers holding a blockage, Energy Minister Agnes Pannier-Runacher said.
-AAP
