It was the second weekend in a row to see thousands rally on the streets against the government’s decision to make it compulsory to have a health pass in order to access restaurants, bars and other cultural establishments.

The pass attests that the holder has either been fully vaccinated, has tested negative over the previous 24 hours or has recovered from COVID during the previous six months.

The new measure was announced last week by President Emmanuel Macron in a bid to boost vaccinations, as the country battles a surge in coronavirus cases.

Meanwhile in London, UK, hundreds of people rallied in the centre of the city, demonstrating against vaccine passport plans there.

Clashes between police and protesters

Several thousand people, divided into at least three rallies, began demonstrating in the early afternoon in Paris.

Mostly made up of ‘yellow vest’ protesters, a first procession set off shortly after 2pm from the Place de la Bastille, bound for the Porte de Champerret.

Police on motorbikes clashed against protesters along the way.

In the Trocadero square several thousand people, rarely masked, gathered at the call of Florian Philippot. “You are thousands,” said the President of the Patriots and former RN No. 2, between two “Marseillaise”.

It is a very good thing that we have a very good relationship with the people,” he said, “but we have to be very careful not to get caught up in a situation where we have to be very careful.

“Freedom, I am not your guinea pig”, summarised a slogan carried on a placard.

Finally, a third procession, made up of several hundred people, left the area around the Conseil d’Etat, bound for the Place des Invalides.

These demonstrations come as a very large majority of French people (76%) approve of President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to make vaccination compulsory for health care workers and other professions, with penalties attached, according to an Elabe poll for BFMTV on 13 July.

The extension of the health pass also receives a majority of approvals.

The health pass, “we would have done well without it if the context was different,” said Health Minister Olivier Véran, speaking to readers of Le Parisien. “We will put an end to it the minute we can,” he promised.

Outside Paris, rallies are taking place in dozens of cities and towns in France.

In Marseilles, thousands of people of all generations marched in a good-natured atmosphere to cries of “Freedom, Freedom” or “Macron, your pass, we don’t want it”, AFP noted.

“I will not take the injection,” said Sandra, a 49-year-old nurse who refused to give her name. “Our country is becoming totalitarian,” said Jean-Claude Dib, 71, a retired truck driver who said he was “ready to fight back.

At least a dozen rallies are taking place in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes.

Demonstrations are taking place in Valence where there are several thousand people, in Lyon, in Auxerre where several hundred people are marching, in Bourg-en-Bresse, in Grenoble.

In the Grand Est region, some 4,000 people are demonstrating, according to the police.

Last Saturday, more than 110,000 people demonstrated throughout France against vaccination, “dictatorship” or the health pass, including 18,000 in Paris divided into several processions and 96,000 in the rest of the country, according to the Interior Ministry.

To stem the spread of the Delta variant, President Emmanuel Macron presented a series of measures on 12 July.

A source of debate and the subject of numerous amendments in the National Assembly, the presentation of a health pass came partially into force on Wednesday.

Already applied in cultural and leisure venues, its extension to cafés, restaurants and trains is planned for the beginning of August.

Even before the adoption of these tougher measures, their mere announcement by President Emmanuel Macron accelerated vaccination: 58% of the total population (39 million people) had received at least one dose by Friday (and 48% are fully vaccinated), compared to 53% and 40% respectively on 10 July.

A provision of the new text, currently being examined by the Senate after a first reading in the National Assembly, opens the way to dismissal for workers in establishments receiving the public who refuse to obtain a health pass.

The bill also provides for compulsory vaccination for health care workers, firefighters and those working with the elderly.

Source: https://www.euronews.com/2021/07/24/tens-of-thousands-protest-against-health-pass-in-france

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With the number of suicides among police on the rise, Paris authorities are investigating yellow vest protesters who encouraged officers to kill themselves.

The largely peaceful demonstrations of the past five months – which demand more help for France’s beleaguered workers, retirees and students – have been noticeably infringed with radical protesters clashing with police.

On Saturday, protesters in the French capital were heard shouting ‘Kill yourselves!’ at police officers.

Police scuffle with protesters. On Saturday, reporters heard some protesters in Paris shouting ‘Kill yourselves!’ at police firing tear gas and rubber projectiles and charging the crowd to contain the violence at the 23rd weekend of yellow vest demonstrations

A protester throws a scooter onto a pile of burning motorbikes during a yellow vest demonstration

Officers were firing tear gas and rubber projectiles and charging the crowd to contain the violence at the 23rd weekend of yellow vest demonstrations.

Police unions denounced the protesters’ call as an unacceptable insult to the officers who have killed themselves and their suffering families.

France’s interior minister Christophe Castaner called it a ‘disgrace’ and pledged his support for police and their loved ones, who have been under extra strain as the yellow vest protests have sometimes turned violent.

The Paris prosecutor’s office said an investigation was opened on Sunday to find those who might be prosecuted for ‘group offence toward a person exercising public authority’.

Police scuffle with protesters. The Paris prosecutor’s office said an investigation was opened on Sunday to find those who might be prosecuted for ‘group offence toward a person exercising public authority’

Police scuffle with protestors during a yellow vest demonstration in Paris, Saturday, April 20, 2019. French yellow vest protesters are marching anew to remind the government that rebuilding the fire-ravaged Notre Dame Cathedral isn’t the only problem the nation needs to solve.

Police unions held silent protests on Friday after two officers killed themselves last week.

Unions say police ranks have seen 28 suicides so far this year, compared to 68 over all of 2018.

On another protest topic, the media rights group Reporters Without Borders and France’s National Journalists Union protested Sunday on behalf of journalists who were detained and roughed up by police during Saturday’s clashes.

The yellow vest movement, named after the high-visibility vests all French drivers must carry in their vehicles, started in November against a hike in fuel taxes.

It spread to become a broad movement against high taxes and Emmanuel Macron’s pro-business policies, and protesters see themselves as standing up for the poor while Mr Macron is seen as representing the rich.

The movement has been marred by protest violence and the extremist views of some yellow vest demonstrators.

Anyone who has been affected by this article or would like to talk to someone can call the Samaritans free on 116 123.

Source: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6944731/Anger-yellow-vest-protesters-urged-French-police-kill-themselves.html

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The sun sets over the River Main in Frankfurt, Germany, Wednesday, Jan. 2, 2019. (AP Photo/Michael Probst) – Michael Probst

BERLIN — European politics just now is a story of how one decision by a pastor’s dutiful daughter has made life miserable for a vicar’s dutiful daughter.

Two of the world’s most important conservative parties are involved in an unintended tutorial on a cardinal tenet of conservatism, the law of unintended consequences, which is that the unintended consequences of decisions in complex social situations are often larger than, and contrary to, those intended.

In 2015, Angela Merkel, the Federal Republic of Germany’s first chancellor from what was East Germany, chose to welcome into Germany about 1 million people, many of them Syrians, fleeing Middle Eastern carnage. This influx stoked European anxieties about immigration threatening social cohesion, anxieties that contributed to the 52 percent-48 percent vote in Britain’s 2016 referendum directing the government to extricate the United Kingdom from the European Union.

In 2019, Theresa May, who was not yet Britain’s prime minister when the referendum occurred and who voted to remain in the EU, is leading, or trying to lead, a fractious party that cannot govern because there is no majority for any plan to effectuate what in 2016 was, but might not still be, the voters’ Brexit desire.

For many years, Merkel has been the closest approximation to an answer to the famous question attributed to Henry Kissinger: If I want to talk to “Europe,” who do I call? She also has embodied Germany’s primal desire for stability, a desire that is the great national constant since Konrad Adenauer served as the Federal Republic of Germany’s first chancellor from 1949 to 1963.

Britain is perhaps, or sort of, exiting the EU. France’s “yellow vest” protesters recently commented on President Emmanuel Macron’s policies with a Gallic vigor (burning cars, smashing shop windows) sufficient to change governance in the predictable direction (taxes decreased, entitlements increased). So, stable Germany is even more important to Europe than it was when Kissinger said that Germany is too large for Europe and too small for the world.

The two greatest leaders of post-1945 Europe, Charles de Gaulle and Margaret Thatcher, opposed the aspiration of an ever-deeper political unification of Europe. Germany precipitated the post-1945 recoil against nationalism, which has been interpreted to dictate the dilution of nationalities by submersion of them into a transnational broth. For most Germans, tiptoeing through modern memory, disputing this interpretation still seems transgressive.

No European nation was as enchanted as Germany was by Barack Obama’s studied elegance and none is more repelled by Donald Trump’s visceral vulgarity. This especially matters at this moment when events are underscoring Germany’s necessary dependence for security on the United States: Germany lives in the neighborhood with two nations, Poland and Hungary, that have illiberal populist regimes. And not far over the horizon Vladimir Putin is destabilizing and dismembering Europe’s geographically largest nation, Ukraine. Germany’s dependence was inadvertently highlighted by Macron’s delusional statement that there must be a “true European army” to “protect ourselves with respect to China, Russia and even the United States.”

Germany has two of the world’s great parties, the Christian Democratic Union and the Social Democratic Party, which in the 19th century invented social democracy that helped to drain the revolutionary steam from the left. Both are in flux.

The CDU is challenged from the right by Alternative for Germany (the subject of a subsequent column) and the SDP, which withered as the junior partner in Merkel’s coalition. The SDP is being eclipsed by the Green Party, whose support rivals that of the CDU, and which is the most popular party with German women.

Extremism, however, is quarantined by the civic culture that so values stability that a poll in this decade showed that more Germans fear inflation — the hyperinflation of 95 years ago was the ultimate destabilizer — than fear cancer or other serious illnesses.

Next year will be the 30th anniversary of German reunification. This will be an occasion for the world to acknowledge that, as has been truly said, today’s Germany is the best Germany the world has seen since it became Germany in 1871.

George Will is a columnist with the Washington Post Writers Group.

Source: https://www.postandcourier.com/opinion/commentary/as-europe-struggles-germany-still-a-beacon-of-stability/article_feee80ec-1059-11e9-92f2-67ef63fdf9ad.html

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(Bloomberg) — Once Emmanuel Macron had clinched the French presidency last year, he headed straight to Berlin to forge a new future for the European Union with Chancellor Angela Merkel.

But despite all the joint briefings, the photo ops and sweeping promises, 19 months later that vision lies in tatters.

With Yellow Vest protesters sweeping through the streets of Paris and frustration at Germany’s foot-dragging mounting inside the ministries, Macron on Monday night changed tack. A string of costly spending promises signaled the end of his plan to win round German conservatives with France’s new-found budget discipline.

The new spending plans may push France’s deficit to as much as 3.4 percent next year, way beyond the EU’s 3 percent limit, Budget Minister Gerald Darmanin said Tuesday. They also consign any hopes of a grand bargain with Germany to the dustbin for the foreseeable future.

“Macron is battling for survival and he knows that he doesn’t get any kudos with the protesters by being friends with Merkel or having a European finance minister,” said Daniel Gros, director of the Brussels-based Center for European Policy Studies. “He’s thrown his European project out of the window.”

Wrong Bet

Macron’s decision to go it alone — pulling the rug out from European officials trying to bring Italy’s budget into line — is a far cry from the vision of a decade of European integration he set out at the Sorbonne University in Paris in September 2017.

The 40-year-old president had laid out a vision of a more assertive Europe, capable of standing up for itself on the world stage and protecting its citizens. But at the center of that was a stronger euro area, in which more risk sharing between members would make the whole bloc more resilient to financial shocks.

Although Germany was the first euro member to breach the 3 percent limit and poured public money into its banks before the EU tightened its rules, conservatives in Berlin were concerned that more risk-sharing would leave German taxpayers on the hook. Macron had bet that by reining in French spending he’d win more support.

He was wrong.

Diluted Reforms

While Merkel has been eager to strengthen the German-French axis with Brexit and populism undermining European integration, she was slow in responding to Macron’s calls on the euro.

Facing strong opposition from hardliners within her party and weakened by a disappointing election result, Merkel only half-heartedly followed Macron’s call to deepen the euro zone and did not embrace his proposal for a euro finance minister.

At Meseberg near Berlin, Macron and Merkel took their first tentative steps toward realizing that in June with a joint commitment to a euro-zone budget. But for Macron that was as good as it got.

The details thrashed out by finance ministers were far short of what France had hoped for. Instead of a game-changing budget that could bolster economies hit by shocks, ministers suggested it could be used for “competitiveness and convergence” — or helping poorer countries catch up. That’s basically an extension of the EU’s existing spending capabilities.

French Expectations

The disappointment runs both ways, of course.

Officials in Berlin have watched with concern, and a degree of resignation, as Macron’s domestic opposition grew. They have seen attempts to push through structural reforms in France blocked by mass protests time and again and see France failing to match the efforts of Ireland during the financial crisis and Germany in the early years of this century.

In Berlin, they see the measures that have been agreed as major concessions and they say the French let their expectations run out of control.

Given the skepticism about France’s potential to reform, Macron was deluding himself with his plan for a European finance minister and a euro area budget big enough to contribute to macroeconomic policy, according to one German official.

“The German conservatives seem to have been opposed to almost every element of Macron’s reforms,” said Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “That is the wrong approach in Europe.”

(Corrects spelling of town were pact was signed in 12th paragraph.)

Source: https://www.investing.com/news/economy-news/macrons-budget-180-shows-hes-given-up-on-germany-1718454

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