A hundred thousand people marched across France on Sunday on the occasion of the 1er May, in a very political context after the presidential election, and several processions were marred by incidents, particularly in Paris.
Clashes opposed the police forces to very mobile groups of young people, on the sidelines of the demonstration in Paris, in which thousands of people participated, AFP noted.
The first tensions took place a few minutes after the departure of the procession. A group of demonstrators, wearing black clothes, gloves and masks, broke away from the main procession to clash with the police. They tried to put up a barricade using palisades and attacked shop windows.
According to an AFP journalist, around twenty brands, mostly McDonald’s, insurers, real estate agencies or banks, were damaged, and a car was broken into. The demonstrators also threw projectiles, including fruit, at the police. The police tried to disperse them using tear gas.
These incidents led the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, to denounce “unacceptable violence” committed by “thugs”. He reported eight injuries among firefighters and gendarmes, and 54 arrests.
The protest dispersed shortly after 6 p.m. The CGT union claimed 50,000 demonstrators, while they were 21,000 according to an accounting by the cabinet Occurrence for a media collective, including AFP, and 24,000 according to the Ministry of the Interior.
This demonstration was organized at the call of trade unions, with demands for the issues of wages, public services, social protection and ecological transition.
Pension reform was one of the sticking points of the day. President Emmanuel Macron is considering raising the retirement age from the current 62 to 64 or 65.
Many left-wing leaders, such as the leader of the radical left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who came third in the first round of the presidential election on April 10, and the boss of the Socialist Party, Olivier Faure, were present in the procession.
In the country, a hundred thousand people marched, a mobilization greater than that of last year, in the whole of France.
In Marseille (south-east), carrying a flag “for the popular union” of left-wing parties, Martine Haccoun, a 65-year-old retired doctor, explained that she had come “to show that Macron was not given a white -signed for five years, we wanted to block Mme Le Pen”, the far-right candidate.
Incidents also took place in Nantes (west). Ultra-left activists “committed a certain number of degradations, and there was the intervention of the police to disperse them”, indicated the prefecture. Windows of real estate agencies were smashed, noted an AFP photographer.