French President Emmanuel Macron has “trampled on democracy” amid ongoing protests by forcing bills through parliament without a vote, an EU MP tells Breitbart.
Nicolas Bay, a French representative within the European Parliament, has said that Emmanuel Macron has “trampled on democracy” in the country by bypassing parliament with recent pension reforms.
Aimed at lowering the age of retirement in the country, the reforms have been extremely unpopular in France, prompting widespread protests and even rioting from members of the French public.
To make matters worse, the Macron administration has used the emergency powers of Article 49.3 of the French constitution to force the reforms through parliament without a vote, something that has only added to the anger of the French populous, as well as representatives serving within the French opposition.
Speaking to Breitbart Europe, Bay argued that the French President has now “once again trampled on democracy” by forcing through the legislation, with the government having prevented those elected to the French parliament from expressing themselves.
“What is amazing is that he could have won a parliamentary majority if he had proposed a more serious and comprehensive reform, and especially if he had taken the time to explain clearly what was at stake,” Bay, a member of former Presidential candidate Eric Zemmour’s Reconquete party, said. “But he decided to force his way through with a project that is not up to scratch.”
“The result is an unfair half-measure, opposed by more than two-thirds of the population, and which totally ignores the main challenge posed by the pay-as-you-go pension model: our declining birth rate,” he went on to say.
French Opposition Launch Bid to Remove Macron Government from Power https://t.co/bbqBXvGXDG
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) March 20, 2023
Not all of Bay’s criticisms were reserved for Macron and his government however, with the Reconquete MEP also hitting out at the country’s left-wing for supposedly playing into the now-extremely unpopular president’s hands.
Although images of rioting and vandalism in France have been making the front pages of news outlets worldwide, Bay explained that such scenes were the exception rather than the norm when it came to ongoing demonstrations against the country’s government.
“The violent acts that followed the pension system reform were spectacular but relatively isolated,” he said. “Their echo is considerable thanks to social networks, however in terms of mobilisation we are very far from the demonstrations of the Yellow Vests or the anti-gay marriage ones.”
Such violent demonstrations appear to have been given some level of soft support by Jean-Luc Mélenchon — France’s answer to Bernie Sanders — who recently warned that the country had yet to see what real violence looks like yet, comparing the movement to the student protests of 1968.
However, Bay warned that the ongoing violent actions coming from the country’s left could very well backfire on the protests by allowing Macron to launch a police crackdown against the movement, a potentially popular move should the demonstrations spiral out of control.
“It is mostly an agitation of the far left led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the overprotected unions who only know how to do two things, block and break, always to the detriment of the working French,” he said. “Macron lets it happen because it will allow him to play his own score: to make people forget his bad reform, he will pretend to restore order in the streets.”
WATCH: Macron Proclaims to 'Regret Nothing' as Fiery Protests Spread Across France Despite Police Ban https://t.co/QvmpMNA4Wx
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) March 19, 2023
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