French protesters spent Saturday marching against the cost of living and the state of their schools. President Emmanuel Macron responded by deciding which of them were allowed to.
Earlier this week, per the BBC, Macron decreed that only demonstrations organized by recognized trade unions would be permitted. So France still has the right to protest. It just needs a membership card now.
Here's what's real, per the BBC and Fox News. The French interior ministry says about 410,000 people marched across France on Saturday. The unions put it at about 800,000. Seventy thousand police were deployed. More than 1,300 people were arrested, and 53 officers were hurt.
Most of the union marches were peaceful. Then, late in the day, police fired tear gas and water cannon in several cities, including Paris. Barricades burned in Marseille. In Bordeaux, people pulled boards off a building to build a barricade. In Lyon, police used tear gas on a crowd that had reportedly gathered in an area the local prefecture declared off-limits. One protester told the BBC there were about 150 of them, mostly high school and university students.
I've covered a lot of countries that ran out of patience. France is the first one that ran out of patience and still filed the paperwork.
Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said several thousand "radical activists" gathered at the rear of the Paris march, including about 500 he identified as rioters. Hundreds of people have already been jailed after fast-track court hearings. France can't fix a classroom in five weeks, but it can hold a trial in an afternoon.
Remember how this started. Fox News reports the unrest began in mid-September as student demonstrations over school conditions. Students asked for better schools. They got 70,000 police, which, to be fair, is a very well-staffed hall monitor program.
Macron has vowed that anyone who loots or destroys property will be made to pay for the damage. Fair enough. But the people marching peacefully are out there because, as one 26-year-old protester told the BBC, the government takes their money and taxes them a lot. They've been paying for the damage since 2017. They'd just like a receipt.
When President Trump blamed the protests on immigration, Macron called foreign leaders' comments "unacceptable and even stupid," per Fox News. On that, at least, he showed real energy. Turns out the man can get very worked up about a problem. It just has to be somebody else's opinion.
Picture a fictional Lyon bakery owner named Odile, who has raised the price of a baguette three times this year and wanted to march about it. She was told her protest wasn't recognized. She has since joined a union, a waiting list and a support group, in that order.
On the sewer scale, this rates four rats out of five. One rat for the schools, one for the prices, one for the permission slip and one for calling the critics stupid. The fifth rat applied for a protest permit and is still waiting on the union.
Macron leaves office next spring. Polls suggest voters will choose between the hard right and the hard left, per the BBC. After nine years of being told which grievances count, France appears ready to recognize a few of its own.
And here's your bill: regular gas averages $4.29 a gallon nationwide today, up from $3.06 a year ago, per AAA, and nobody here needed a union card to notice.
This article is satire. The Demorat is a parody news site; real facts are drawn from the linked sources, and jokes, invented scenes, and fictional characters are not real.
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