More French protests see roads blocked, trains disrupted and scuffles in Paris

More French protests see roads blocked, trains disrupted and scuffles in Paris
# 07 December 2019 19:25 (UTC +04:00)

Truckers blocked roads in about 10 regions around France on Saturday to protest against a planned reduction in tax breaks on diesel for road transport, while train and metro services remained heavily disrupted by a strike against pension reform, APA reports citing Reuters.

In Paris there were scuffles with police in the Denfert Rochereau area of the residential Left Bank as several hundred “yellow vest” protesters continued their weekly demonstrations, but numbers were relatively small compared with previous weeks as the transport strike made it hard to reach the capital.

The combined pressure of the yellow vest movement over the cost of living and union protests against pension reform are a major challenge to President Emmanuel Macron’s efforts to balance the state budget and introduce more environmentally friendly legislation in the second half of his mandate.

Truckers federation Otre (Organisation des Transporteurs Routiers Européens) said it opposed an increase in taxes on diesel for commercial vehicles as part of the government’s draft 2020 budget.

“Our movement is a movement of rage against the continued fiscal punishment of road transport that we can no longer tolerate,” Alexis Gibergues, Otre’s president in the Ile-de-France region around Paris, said on LCI television.

Gibergues said truckers were not targeting city centers for now, but that could change if the government does not respond.

French TV showed images of trucks blocking motorways in several parts of the country including the Ile-de-France. Passenger cars were allowed to pass slowly, but many foreign trucks were forced to stop.

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