France Deploys 70,000 Police as Workers Launch Nationwide Cost-of-Living Strike
France entered a nationwide strike on Thursday with public workers, teachers, transport staff, energy employees and students confronting a government that has answered a deepening social crisis with roughly 70,000 police.
The November 5 mobilization targets rising living costs, stagnant pay, depleted public services and worsening conditions in schools. The CGT called on workers to broaden the strike after the government failed to answer union demands at an October 21 meeting. The CFDT joined the inter-union action, calling for a €100 net increase in the minimum wage, annual public-sector pay negotiations and heavier taxation of the highest incomes.
Those demands put wages and public provision—not disorder—at the center of the day. Yet President Emmanuel Macron convened a defense and security meeting before the marches, and his government placed the threat of renewed unrest at the center of its response.
“We are extremely vigilant because it is out of the question to relive October 17,” government spokeswoman Maud Bregeon said after Wednesday’s cabinet meeting, according to Reuters.
October 17 brought riots and looting that damaged shops and public buildings after months of anger over household costs, education and public services. The violence exposed the government’s loss of political control, but it does not erase the material grievances now driving another day of action. The latest mobilization includes organized labor federations and student groups, not a single undifferentiated street crowd.
Domestic intelligence projected between 500,000 and 700,000 demonstrators outside Paris, according to BFM TV reporting cited by Reuters. The Education Ministry expected 17.5 percent of public primary-school teachers to strike. Rail and urban transit faced disruption, while state utility EDF said power-sector unions would participate.
That participation matters beyond France. A September energy strike cut electricity supply and reduced delivery capacity at Dunkirk LNG, the country’s largest liquefied-natural-gas terminal. A prolonged confrontation could therefore reach European energy logistics as well as French classrooms, trains and municipal services.
The workers’ program is concrete. The CFDT says the lowest wages, pensions, housing support, minimum-income support and student grants must rise. It demands an end to public subsidies for companies without conditions and calls for industrial and environmental policy that protects employment. The CGT describes a country where prices climb while wages stall, precarious work spreads, services shrink and young people see no secure future.
Students have linked those economic demands to fear over policing. “We’re trying to keep mobilising as much as possible,” 19-year-old Paris student Irma de Banville told Reuters. “Some people aren’t doing so because they’re afraid. A lot of people are afraid of police violence.”
The government says it will investigate abuses while defending police tactics. That promise will be tested against a deployment larger than the police forces of many countries. The scale itself reveals the administration’s dilemma: Macron wants to project order, but every line of riot police also advertises how far the presidency stands from workers and students demanding basic economic security.
The confrontation arrives five months before France’s presidential election. An official close to Macron described the government’s objective to Reuters as getting “the river that overflowed back into its bed” so the campaign can begin calmly. The metaphor is revealing. It treats social anger as water to be contained rather than a political verdict to be answered.
France’s unions are forcing the opposite question into public view: who pays for economic stability? Their answer is higher wages, stronger services and greater contributions from the wealthy. The government’s immediate answer is 70,000 police. Thursday’s marches will show which response carries more authority in a country already looking beyond Macron.
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