There is still a fuel emergency in France, with petrol stations running out of petrol for days due to the strike that began three weeks ago in the refineries and depots of Total Energies and Esso-ExxonMobil and is still ongoing.
The government spokesman, Olivier Veran, promised citizens at a press conference that "there will be
significant improvements in the coming days", thanks to the injunctions of the personnel essential
to the functioning of the deposits, announced yesterday in the National Assembly
by the Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne
, and started today at the Esso-Exxon Mobil refinery in Gravenchon-Port-Je'rome, Normandy.
Other injunctions could be launched in the Flanders depot, near Dunkirk.
CGT, the union that is carrying out negotiations with Total Energies and Esso-ExxonMobil, has defined them as illegal.
His secretary, Thierry Defresne, on leaving a meeting with the management of TotalEnergies - the first since the crisis - explained that the company "accepts the strike in the structures, but hopes to restart the deliveries of the stocks even before. of the restarting of the plants ".
Of the seven refineries
in metropolitan France - another is located in Martinique -
six are now blocked
.
Workers are demanding a 10 percent increase in wages, in the face of profits made above all by TotalEnergies
in the second half of 2022, after the explosion in the price of gas and oil due to the war in Ukraine.
Gasoline shortages now affect a third of service stations
.
The regions most affected are the
Hauts-de-France and the Ile de France
, where respectively 48.4 percent and 33.9 percent of distributors are involved.
gettyimages
France, distributors out of service due to strikes
Some departments have taken countermeasures, for example by
prohibiting customers from buying entire tanks of fuel
or by setting a cap in terms of liters.
Everywhere the scenes of petrol pumps out of service or, on the contrary, of interminable queues where there are still some reserves have become normal.
In Angy, in the Oise, the inhabitants denounced today lines of two kilometers that have paralyzed traffic.
On the 'peripheerique' - the ring road that delimits the territory of the municipality of Paris - and in particular at Porte d'Aubervilliers, in recent days many motorists have waited from four in the morning to be able to refuel a few liters.
Macron: "The return to normal next week"
Faced with refinery blockages that have prevented the refueling of many service stations for several days,
Emmanuel Macron predicts that "the return to normal" will occur "over the next week"
.
"It is a question of social conflicts in
companies that have made significant profits,
that have distributed a lot to their shareholders and that
have been very slow" in terms of redistribution to their employees,
explained the President of the Republic in an interview with France 2. .
Macron also launched
"an appeal to responsibility"
, recalling that
the prime minister has decided to foreclose the workers
of the refineries if the issue does not break free in the context of the negotiations between the oil group and the employees.
"We had to do it, you can't leave the country blocked because someone wants to push further and further".