It seems the disgruntled South African workforce isn’t alone. French riot police resorted to tear gas to disperse protesters outside the Paris Motor Show on Tuesday. The incident came as the CGT labour union, one of the two biggest in France, sought to flex its muscles by organising the street rallies in the first nationwide protests since Socialist President Francois Hollande took power in May.
Police intervened after around 1 000 protesters, including workers from a doomed PSA Peugeot Citroen plant, attempted to break through a security cordon around the location of the car show on the edge of Paris, a Reuters reporter at the scene said. Some protesters pelted the police with eggs and flour during the standoff.
Several protestors managed to get inside the show and staged a peaceful demonstration on the stands of Peugeot and Citroën. The two automakers anticipated the protests and replaced all of the concept cars they had on display with regular-production models. “We should be greeted with a red carpet,” said a PSA employee in a televised interview that aired on France 3, “we built all of the cars in there!”
This represents just one of many nationwide demonstrations in France, where the unemployment rate has risen above 10 percent, or 3 million people, for the first time in 13 years. PSA Peugeot Citroen itself has been removed from the French CAC 40 stock index due to a 60 percent drop in shares in the past year.
