For the High Commissioner for Planning, this movement is "of course" reminiscent of the social protest of "yellow vests" which peaked at the end of 2018 and gave rise to demonstrations everywhere in France, sometimes violent, against the decline in purchasing power. and rising fuel prices.
"There are, every week and every day, people who still die in hospital from this disease, from Covid-19 and there is this movement, which is a protest movement with the desire to block the country to obtain, we don't know what exactly, but we can clearly see that it is a movement that I will call +secession+ from a part of the country, which does not understand, does not find itself and has a desire for revolt", he declared on France Inter.
"We note that a part of our compatriots, an important and significant part of our compatriots no longer believe anything they are told", "politicians", "journalists", "scientists" and " doctors,” he added.
And "this is the first time that we have come to it", he explains, "in a country like ours, which was a great scientific country, a great country of medicine, to question the word of those who are in charge of caring".
A heterogeneous gathering of opponents of President Emmanuel Macron and "yellow vests", the movement called "freedom convoys" was formed on the model of the mobilization which paralyzes the Canadian capital Ottawa.
Several hundred vehicles had joined the ring road around 10:00 a.m. on Saturday, where the police were issuing tickets for "participation in an unauthorized demonstration", according to the Paris police headquarters, which recorded 151 PVs in the middle of the morning.
According to messages consulted by AFP, some conveyors want to become "a mass of vehicles impossible to contain by the police unless the latter themselves block the main axes of the capital".
Nearly 7,200 police and gendarmes have been deployed "to enforce the bans on vehicle convoys", according to the PP.
© 2022 AFP