In his most substantive public remarks on the Yellow Vests protests that have roiled France, President Emmanuel Macron promised steps to address them.
PARIS — Faced with violent protests and calls for his resignation, President Emmanuel Macron of France said Monday that he had heard the anger of the many whose economic suffering has burst into the open in recent weeks and that he would take immediate steps to relieve their hardship.
He announced tax cuts and wage increases for France’s struggling middle class and working poor, vowing to increase the minimum wage. He promised to listen to the voices of the country, to its small-town mayors and its working people.
“There is anger, anger and indignation that many French share,” he said in a nationally televised speech.
It is the anger of “the couple who earn salaries that do not finish the month, and who get up every day early and come home late,” he said. “It is the single mother, a widow, a divorcee,” whose life is no longer worth living, he said, and “has no more hope.”
It is anger too, he said, of retired people of small means who have “contributed all their lives and often helped both parents and children, and no longer make ends meet.”
Mr. Macron said the details of his relief steps would be announced by Prime Minister Édouard Phillipe in Parliament on Tuesday, but that there would be a 100 euro ($114) increase in the monthly minimum wage starting in January; that taxes on overtime pay would be eliminated and that retirees whose pensions are less than 2,000 euros ($2,270) a month would no longer be asked to pay a recent increase in social security taxes.
His speech was an attempt by a politician regarded as aloof and imperious to connect with ordinary citizens in Europe’s third-largest economy. The speech followed a month of turmoil in which a movement known as the Yellow Vests rampaged through Paris and other French cities. The movement, which began as a revolt against a fuel tax increase, has morphed into an angry rebuke of Mr. Macron and his government’s failure to focus on what his critics call France’s forgotten middle class.
“When one listens to the Yellow Vests, one hears many different demands, but there is more and more agreement that Emmanuel Macron should resign,” said Thomas Snegaroff, a professor of political science at Sciences Po in Paris.
