https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/...ycsrp_catchall
Legislators toppled France’s government in a confidence vote on Monday, a new crisis for Europe’s second-largest economy that obliges President Emmanuel Macron to search for a fourth prime minister in 12 months.
Prime Minister Francois Bayrou was ousted overwhelmingly in a 364-194 vote against him.
Mr Bayrou paid the price for what appeared to be a staggering political miscalculation, gambling that officials would back his view that France must slash public spending to repair its debts.
cut spending to reduce debt how novel
BAHHAAAA
https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/20...upt-daily-life
France’s streets ablaze as antigovernment protests disrupt daily life
Hundreds arrested after more than 200,000 demonstrators force French government into high-stakes confrontation.
A protester of the 'Block Everything' movement displays a French national flag next to burning rubbish bins in Lille, northern France [Jean-Francois Badias/AP Photo]
Published On 11 Sep 202511 Sep 2025
A nationwide wave of antigovernment protests swept across France, filling streets with smoke, burning barricades and tear gas as demonstrators rallied against budget cuts and political instability.
The “Block Everything” campaign created a formidable test for President Emmanuel Macron and transformed Sebastien Lecornu’s first day as prime minister into an immediate crisis.
While the movement did not achieve its goal of total national disruption on Wednesday, it successfully paralysed significant portions of daily life and ignited hundreds of flashpoints throughout the country.
Despite deploying 80,000 police officers who dismantled barricades and arrested hundreds, disturbances multiplied across France. Protesters torched a bus in Rennes, while severed electric cables in the southwest halted train service and created traffic chaos.
Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau reported nearly 200,000 demonstrators nationwide by evening, though the CGT union claimed closer to 250,000 participants.
His ministry documented more than 450 arrests, hundreds in custody, more than a dozen injured officers, and upwards of 800 protest actions ranging from rallies to street fires. Retailleau declared the day “a defeat for those who wanted to block the country”, yet the government’s own statistics suggested otherwise.
The “Bloquons Tout” protests, while not matching the scale of France’s 2018 yellow vest movement, highlighted the recurring pattern of unrest during Macron’s presidency: Huge police deployments, violent outbursts, and persistent confrontations between government and citizenry.
Since his 2022 re-election, Macron has faced intense public anger over controversial pension reforms, and nationwide riots following the 2023 police killing of a teenager in Paris’s suburbs.
The demonstrations and intermittent clashes with riot police across Paris and beyond intensified the sense of crisis enveloping France after the government’s collapse on Monday, when former Prime Minister Francois Bayrou lost a parliamentary confidence vote.
The protests immediately confronted Bayrou’s successor, Lecornu, who took office on Wednesday.