A week after the presidential elections, which saw a historically low turnout, over 200,000 people took to the streets across France on the 1st of May, some 24,000 of them in Paris alone.
In Paris, the demonstration was led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the presidential candidate of the French Insoumise Party, a coalition of different left parties. In the run-up to the demonstration, he called on different left parties to unite in a bloc on the 1st of May in order to get out of a "culture of defeat". In an interview, he called for uniting in a struggle to win. However, it was the masses who fought on the 1st of May, not any party bosses. Eight policemen were injured when demonstrators started to set cars on fire and destroy shops. When the fire brigade came to put out the fires, the masses tried to stop them (video here). The extent to which the "left" politicians are on the side of the masses was then also shown in the subsequent tweets accusing the police of not enforcing the right to peaceful demonstration - in plain language, not stopping the masses from their justified struggles and letting civil law and order prevail. The demonstrations in France were proof that less and less masses trust the bourgeois politicians and their pent-up anger was unleashed on the 1st of May. Numerous strikes by workers are to follow in the coming weeks, according to the trade unions.
