Civil servants take to the streets to protest the French President

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

At the call of unions, nearly 400,000 civil servants protested across French cities and carried out a large-scale strike.

The main reason for the large civil servant march is the new reform policies that French President Emmanuel Macron has been applying in the field of public administration.

Following the call of unions, nearly 400,000 civil servants protested across French cities. Photo: AFP.

Specifically, before taking power, Mr. Macron announced that he would cut at least 120,000 civil servant positions in the state apparatus within 5 years.

Then, in July, Macron’s government increased the social security contributions deducted from the salaries of civil servants. And finally, despite promising to improve the purchasing power of civil servants, Macron’s government will only increase the wage coefficient by 0.6% in 2017, then immediately freeze it in 2018.

The aim of this series of measures is to reduce the budget burden on the public administration sector, which is one of the largest employers in France.

In France, public administration is divided into three branches. The first branch is the state public administration, which are civil servants working in state-level government agencies, the most populous of which are civil servants in the education sector. Next is the local public administration, which are civil servants working in local territories such as regional councils, city councils or town halls. The last branch is the state civil servants in the hospital sector, including doctors, nurses and caregivers.

With such a complex organization, the public administration sector in France is also massive in scale. Overall, by the end of 2016, France had 5.64 million civil servants, the highest in Europe. For comparison, Germany only has 4.9 million civil servants while the German population is more than 15 million people larger than the French population.

For that reason, administrative reform and reducing the number of civil servants is considered one of the top reform priorities of French President Emmanuel Macron, aiming to reduce the budget burden and improve the operational efficiency of a public administration that is known for being bureaucratic and stagnant.

Of course, these reform intentions greatly affect the interests of French civil servants, so civil servants have taken to the streets with attacks that Mr. Macron's government is increasingly impoverishing civil servants and leaving them to work in poor conditions and with poor treatment.

However, the current relatively weak resistance from French civil servants, demonstrated by the scale of protests not being as large as expected, will hardly make Mr. Macron's administration change its mind./.

According to VOV