Tens of thousands demonstrate in Paris against austerity

Photo: AFP

Tens of thousands of supporters of France's Communist-backed, anti-capitalist Left Front marched in Paris on Sunday to denounce austerity and demand an end to the country's "monarchical" style of government.

Chanting "resistance, resistance" the demonstrators thronged Place de la Bastille for a "citizen's march" aimed at pressuring President Francois Hollande, a pragmatic Socialist, to adopt a more traditionally leftist course.

"The trial period is over and the balance is short," the Left Front's firebrand leader, Jean-Luc Melenchon, told the crowd on the eve of the first anniversary of Hollande's election.

Imposing austerity on the people of Europe, even though governments "know the debt ... will never be repaid," was "useless, cruel and sadistic," he argued.

Melenchon's Left Party, which leads the Left Front, together with the Communist Party, claimed that 180,000 people had attended the march. The police estimated the figure at 30,000.

Melenchon, who placed fourth in the first round of last year's presidential election, backed Hollande for president against incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy in the run-off vote, but has since become one of Hollande's fiercest critics.

"He is one of the causes of the crisis - like Mrs Merkel and other European leaders who have chosen austerity," Melenchon, who quit the Socialist Party in 2008, accused Hollande in an interview Sunday in Le Parisien daily.

The maverick politician, who attracted huge crowds at his revolutionary-themed election rallies in 2012, is in competition with far-right leader Marine Le Pen for voters turned off by mainstream politics.

In April, he seized on a scandal involving Hollande's former budget minister, Jerome Cahuzac, and a Swiss bank account, to call for a "clean sweep" of the political class.

A number of demonstrators at Sunday's march waved brooms strung with signs calling for a "Sixth Republic" to replace the 55-year-old Fifth Republic that shifted powers from parliament to the president.

Many accused Hollande, who steers a pragmatic centre-left course, of selling out on Socialist values.

"Everything we're doing is for German pensioners," Yves Descubes, a middle-aged civil servant from Bordeaux said, referring to France's attempts to shrink its debt and deficit by freezing spending and hiking taxes.

"Instead of buying two shirts a year, now I buy one," he said. "That's not how we're going to get out of this crisis."

Hollande is being criticized from all sides as he marks one year in power, against the backdrop of spiralling unemployment and plummeting poll ratings.

Sarkozy's Union for a Popular Movement party has drawn on Hollande's record in a campaign to recruit new members that was launched Sunday. The campaign poster shows a bedraggled Hollande dripping with rain on the day of his inauguration, and is stamped with a single-word slogan: "Failure."

Voice of Russia, dpa