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Macron calls defence council and allows only union marches before Saturday's protests
The French president condemned far-left 'sedition' after the worst street violence in years. Mélenchon vowed to wreck the prime minister's meeting with party leaders, and big-city mayors want an independent inquiry.
Key points
- Macron will chair a defence council on Friday ahead of mass demonstrations on 24 October.
- Only trade-union marches will be authorised nationwide on Saturday.
- Police numbers will rise by about 20% on the 17 October deployment of some 60,000.
President Emmanuel Macron will chair an emergency defence council on Friday and has ordered that only trade-union demonstrations be allowed across France on Saturday, as the government braces for a fresh wave of mass protests after the worst street violence the country has seen in years.
“A defence council meeting will be convened tomorrow under my chairmanship, and we will take further decisions,” Macron said on Thursday after meeting intelligence chiefs. He condemned what he called “sedition” by far-left groups, saying they posed a “grave danger” to the Republic.
Protests on 17 October, joined by unions, Yellow Vest activists and students angry about living costs, the state of schools and fuel prices, ended in looting and clashes with police. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez had expected about 200,000 people; between 550,000 and 800,000 turned out. The authorities have acknowledged that intelligence services underestimated the scale.
For Saturday, prefects can ban unauthorised gatherings, especially those called by groups lacking what the government calls “legitimacy”. Some 60,000 police and gendarmes were deployed on 17 October, and that force is expected to grow by about a fifth, backed by Sentinelle soldiers and elite units. Several city centres have been under curfew since Monday.
A fractious meeting ahead
Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has invited party leaders to Matignon to discuss policing, writing that he wanted to talk to them “about the police” and complaining of “a very French kind of politico-media schizophrenia”.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, founder of La France insoumise, was defiant. “We’re going to go, we’re going to wreck your meeting!” he said. His coordinator Manuel Bompard, who will attend, said he would demand “apologies”, “explanations” and “political answers”. National Rally leaders Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella, and the centre-right Édouard Philippe, will stay away.
The mayors of Paris, Lyon and Marseille, Emmanuel Grégoire, Grégory Doucet and Benoît Payan, called in a joint newspaper article for an “independent commission” on the government’s public-order strategy and an “exceptional national solidarity fund”.