Lecornu Offers France’s Schools €64bn and the Students Say No
In his address to the nation, Sébastien Lecornu said parliament would debate a budget on 12 November containing €64bn for education, a slight increase, along with school renovation and better timetables. The main student association says he did not answer their demands. Hundreds of schools remain blockaded and more protests were called for today.
“We have a duty to listen to them,” Mr Lecornu said. “Taking young people seriously means supporting their engagement just as much as sharing the difficulties, but also the constraints, with them.” Anaïs Ella, speaking for Les Lycéens, was unimpressed: one of his proposals, filling teaching posts in exam-year classes, “was the basics of the education system”. Money would meet some demands, she said, but what is needed is a reset between government and students. On policing, the interior minister Laurent Nuñez, himself a former chief of the Paris police, confirmed he had ordered forces to stop using the type of stun grenade linked to a fifteen-year-old losing his hand, after an emergency ministerial meeting at which Emmanuel Macron demanded “empathy” and more “pedagogy”: “We don’t deal with a movement of highschoolers like we deal with a movement of adults.” Eighteen investigations into possible police brutality are under way, including one into a fourteen-year-old whose jaw was shattered. The genuinely new element arrived on Wednesday evening, and it connects this to the wider war: the French foreign ministry summoned the Iranian ambassador over what it called a “disinformation campaign conducted by the Iranian authorities” about the protests, saying misleading content put out online by official Iranian accounts was “absolutely unacceptable”. Tehran had summoned the French ambassador the day before, alleging “violent treatment” of protesters; Paris called that baseless.