""Did you see what happened in Nepal?" Mehdi asked his friends gathered early this Wednesday morning alongside hundreds of other demonstrators outside an east Paris hospital where healthcare workers are on strike. He was referring to the protesters who set fire to the Nepalese parliament and forced the resignation of the country's prime minister. The analogy was lost on nobody. The French, too, are exhausted by a political system stretched to its limits."
"Those frustrations erupted on September 10, when a wave of demonstrations unfurled across France. At shopping malls and roundabouts, outside high schools and alongside highway toll booths, hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets in rejection of Macron, more than a year after the president's camp was dealt a severe blow in the summer 2024 snap legislative elections."
"On September 8, the minority government headed by centrist Prime Minister François Bayrou lost a critical confidence vote in the National Assembly, ousting him from the premiership and burying his unpopular 2026 austerity plan. The vote again confirmed the weak hold of Macron's centrist and conservative allies in the lower house of France's parliament, where they control just over a third of seats."
Widespread demonstrations swept France on September 10 after the centrist government collapsed and Prime Minister François Bayrou lost a confidence vote on September 8. Protesters mobilized at shopping malls, roundabouts, schools and highway tolls, expressing rejection of President Emmanuel Macron and his allies. Bayrou's ouster buried a proposed 2026 austerity plan featuring about €44 billion in cuts and underscored the weak parliamentary position of Macron-aligned centrists and conservatives, who hold just over a third of seats. Demonstrators compared events to violent uprisings elsewhere, reflecting popular exhaustion with the political system, while a divided left-wing opposition struggled to translate unrest into political gains.
Read at The Nation
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