Macron tells workers protesting job losses to ‘stop wreaking f***ing havoc’
‘Stop stirring s*** up’, the President added
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Your support makes all the difference.French President Emmanuel Macron has generated outrage in France by telling protesting workers battling to save their jobs to “stop wreaking f***ing havoc”.
Mr Macron was visiting a training centre in central France, where workers from GM&S car parts factories were protesting.
As the President spoke, some of the GM&S workers demonstrating outside the building became involved in confrontations with riot police.
During his visit a local Socialist party official told him another factory, 150 miles away from the threatened GM&S plant was in short supply of workers.
Mr Macron reportedly said: “There are some who, rather than wreaking f***ing havoc, would be better off seeking if they could get a job there because some of them have the right qualifications,” the Telegraph reports.
He also accused them of “stirring up s***”, French language website theLocal.fr reports.
The President has faced repeated claims he is a “president of the rich”, and this week scrapped France’s symbolic wealth tax, immediately sparking remonstrations from opposition parties and unions.
Prime Minister Edouard Philippe estimated some 10,000 people with 35 billion euros worth of assets left in the past 15 years, Reuters reports.
The move has also caused unease among Mr Macron’s centrist majority.
“Yachts, private jets, race horses, races cars or gold ingots are no longer included in the new wealth tax. That can’t be,” Joel Giraud, an allied lawmaker charged with steering the budget through parliamentary committees told Le Parisien.
“These kinds of symbols must be taxed much more. A yacht is bling-bling. It isn’t productive for the economy,” he added.
Under Mr Macron’s recently unveiled budget, corporation tax is also due to be reduced to 25 per cent by 2022 – a substantial drop from its current level of 33 per cent.
“These tax measures from the right wing will have a brutal and violent effect on worsening inequality,” former socialist economy minister Michel Sapin told Paris Match magazine on Tuesday.
Following Mr Macron’s latest outburst France’s socialist party tweeted: “Macron does it again,” and called on him to “watch his language and respect the French people”.
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