French workers angry with President Emmanuel Macron and his plan to raise the pension age blocked access to a terminal at Paris' main airport as part of a nationwide day of protests, forcing some travelers to get there on foot
PARIS, March 23 - Protesters angry withand his plan to raise the pension age blocked access to an airport terminal, sat on train tracks, clashed with police and threw projectiles at a police station in a day of demonstrations across France.
Police fired tear gas at protesters in the western city of Nantes. In Rennes, they used water cannon, BFM TV footage showed. Also in the west in Lorient, Ouest-France newspaper said projectiles triggered a brief fire in the yard of a police station. Roissy-Charles De Gaulle airport outside Paris was hit by wildcat action by workers. Near Toulouse in the southwest, burning piles of debris blocked traffic on a highway and sent plumes of smoke into the sky.
"There is a lot of anger, an explosive situation," the leader of the hardline CGT union, Philippe Martinez, said at the start of a rally in Paris. Union leaders called for calm but were angry with what they calledMacron broke weeks of silence on the new policy to say he would stand firm and the law would come into force by the end of the year. He compared the protests to the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol.
"I'm on strike to protest against the pensions reform, but also against what is happening in the government," 27-year-old Air France programming officer Lucile Bidet said at a rally in Nantes."He's the one setting the country on fire," the CGT's Celine Verzeletti told France Inter radio station.
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