Politics. By scheduling the confidence vote just before "Let's Block Everything": Bayrou wants to extinguish social discontent

Will social protests be short-circuited by François Bayrou's surprise announcement ? In the chemical, metallurgy, retail and service industries, transport, and the student world... Calls for strikes and demonstrations have multiplied in the wake of the "Block Everything" movement , initially planned for September 10.

And it is obviously no coincidence that the Prime Minister has decided to submit to a vote of confidence in the National Assembly... on September 8. The date is two days before the call to shut down France, particularly against his budget proposal and its 44 billion cuts.

"France is not those who want to destroy it through disorder, it is those who want to build it through courage and generosity. The French have the right to demonstrate, but we have the duty to move forward," justified the head of government, calling the French people to witness.

Born on social media and bringing together diverse anger, the “Block Everything” movement was supposed to take the form of a day without work, without transport, without consumption. It gained visibility this weekend with the support of a large part of the left, led by La France Insoumise, and the call for a “general strike” by its leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon .

"A specialist in organizing chaos without questioning the consequences," says François Bayrou , faced with the threat of a mobilization which, if successful, was likely to turn into a crash test for the executive.

With his "gamble," the Prime Minister has taken these protesters by surprise, reminiscent of the Yellow Vests of 2018. He has also deprived the leader of the rebels of a popular platform. But anger at the government's choices will not be buried, as the reasons for discontent are numerous and, in some cases, long-standing.

On the table in particular: the persistent malaise in the health sector . On Monday in the capital, caregivers from the Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris (AP-HP, 38 establishments in Île-de-France, 100,000 professionals and eight million patients) met in a general assembly to decide on a "united strike" movement starting September 5, which could set the tone for the rest of the country.

And the discontent could survive the possible fall of the government. The pharmacists' inter-union is planning to close pharmacies on September 18 and then "every Saturday starting September 27" if the government does not reverse the price cuts for generic drugs, which it already mobilized against in mid-August.

The National Taxi Federation (FNDT) intends to resume its mobilization on September 5 , which it carried out in the spring, mainly against the reform of the coverage of patient transport costs, which is scheduled to come into force in October.

Cautious about the vaguely defined "Block Everything" movement, the unions had reserved their position on September 10. But the inter-union group—CFDT, CGT, FO, CFE-CGC, CFTC, Unsa, Solidaires, and FSU—has its own timetable. Before François Bayrou's "shake-up-everything" press conference, it had planned to meet on September ¹ to decide how to proceed to "together defend our social model and dignity at work."

The meeting has been brought forward to this Friday, announced Frédéric Souillot, general secretary of Force Ouvrière (FO), on Monday evening. "Regardless of the September 8 confidence vote, I believe that workers must mobilize because the Lépine competition of bad ideas and social violence against workers must stop," the union leader argued. This summer, the mobilization took the form of an online petition on the website change.org, which had gathered nearly 350,000 signatures as of Monday.