Civil servants take to the streets to protest against the French President.

For the first time in 10 years, civil servants working in the French government took to the streets to protest.

Following calls from trade unions, nearly 400,000 civil servants demonstrated across French cities, staging a large-scale strike.

The main reason behind the large-scale march by civil servants was the new reform policies that French President Emmanuel Macron has been implementing in the field of public administration.

Following calls from trade unions, nearly 400,000 civil servants protested across French cities. Photo: AFP.

Specifically, even before taking power, Macron had announced that he would cut at least 120,000 civil service positions within the government apparatus over the next five years.

Next, in July, Macron's administration increased the social security contribution rate deducted from civil servants' incomes. And finally, despite promising to improve the purchasing power of civil servants, Macron's administration will only increase the salary coefficient by 0.6% in 2017 and then immediately freeze it in 2018.

The aim of this series of measures is to reduce the budgetary burden on the public administration sector, which is one of the most labor-intensive sectors in France.

In France, public administration is divided into three branches. The first is state public administration, which includes civil servants working in state-level government agencies, with the largest group being in education. Next is local public administration, which includes civil servants working in local territories such as regional councils, city councils, or town halls. The final branch consists of state civil servants in the hospital sector, including doctors, nurses, and orderlies.

With such a complex organizational structure, the public administration sector in France is also enormous in scale. Overall, as of the end of 2016, France had 5.64 million civil servants, the highest in Europe. For comparison, Germany had only 4.9 million civil servants, while its population was more than 15 million larger than France's.

For that reason, administrative reform and reducing the number of civil servants are considered among the top reform priorities of French President Emmanuel Macron, aiming to alleviate the budgetary burden and improve the efficiency of a public administration known for its bureaucracy and inefficiency.

Of course, these reform intentions greatly affect the interests of French civil servants, so civil servants took to the streets in large numbers, criticizing Macron's government for increasingly impoverishing them and forcing them to work in poor conditions and with inadequate benefits.

Nevertheless, the relatively weak resistance currently shown by French civil servants, as evidenced by the smaller-than-expected scale of the protests, is unlikely to change Macron's mind.

According to VOV