Macron lectures UK on democracy while France burns every Saturday – George Galloway

Published time: 23 Mar, 2019 07:35

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"Yellow vests" demonstrators portest on March 16, 2019. ©REUTERS / Benoit Tessier

The French president chided British MPs for failing to respect the will of the people by accepting the Brexit deal. The lecture is quite rich coming from a leader whose country “is on fire every Saturday” George Galloway said.

Emmanuel Macron, one of the most vocal European critics of Britain’s indecisiveness on Brexit, voiced his frustration on Thursday during a European Council meeting on Brexit.

“We should respect what the British people have decided,” he said. “We need to hear our people, we need to address their fears. We can’t play with fears, or simply tear up pages without offering anything else.”

Macron’s own record of hearing people out is far from flawless, considering the ongoing mass protests in France, which were ignited by the French government’s austerity policies. Paris was criticized for its heavy-handed approach against demonstrators, including allowing police to use mutilating riot control weapons.

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“As I recall, [Louis XVI] Bourbon, the king of France, banned demonstrations back in 1789. We know what happened next. The French people are not to be excluded from their own streets,” British political commentator George Galloway, who previously served as a Labour MP, remarked.

By the way, he was lecturing [Britain] about democracy, while his whole country is on fire every Saturday afternoon.

One of the latest developments in the months-long stand-off in France is the Interior Ministry banning rallies in some parts of Paris in response to rioting last weekend. Macron also announced plans to deploy French soldiers in the streets this Saturday to secure government buildings and symbolic sites. Critics say this smacks of tasking the military with policing, which hasn’t happened in France since the late 1940s, right after World War II.