Tag Archives: President Emmanuel Macron

France’s COVID-19 cases reach national record while deaths also rise

PARIS (Reuters) -France had its worst-ever day in terms of new COVID-19 cases on Thursday, with more than 91,000 new cases being recorded while the number of deaths also climbed, as the country battles against a fifth wave of the virus.

“Today’s figures are not good,” said Health Minister Olivier Veran.

Veran had earlier told reporters that the case number would stand at around 88,000 for Thursday, but the final official tally from the health ministry showed 91,608 new cases.

Veran had already warned earlier this week that France would soon be at 100,000 new COVID-19 cases per day.

Data from the health ministry also showed that France registered a further 179 COVID-19 deaths in hospitals over the last 24 hours, while the number of COVID-19 patients in intensive care units reached 3,208, up by 61 from the previous day.

President Emmanuel Macron is hoping France’s COVID-19 vaccine booster campaign will help to contain the fifth wave of the coronavirus to hit the country.

He is aiming to avoid imposing tough, new restrictions, although the French government has said all options will be considered to tackle any rapid deterioration in France’s COVID-19 situation.

(Reporting by Sudip Kar-Gupta and Juliette Jabkhiro, editing by Mark Heinrich, Barbara Lewis and Aurora Ellis)

French police evict migrants from camp on Channel coast

By Juliette Jabkhiro

GRANDE-SYNTHE, France (Reuters) – Police on Tuesday tore down a makeshift camp near the northern French port of Dunkirk where scores of migrants who say they are fleeing war, poverty and persecution in the Middle East were hunkered down with hopes of reaching Britain.

Armed officers entered the camp, which runs along a disused railway line, before workers in protective suits pulled down tents and plastic shelters.

Charity workers say the 27 migrants who drowned in the Channel last Wednesday had stayed in the same area before they attempted the perilous sea crossing from France to Britain last Wednesday. Their dinghy deflated in the open sea.

The number of migrants crossing the Channel has surged to 25,776 in 2021, up from 8,461 in 2020 and 1,835 in 2019, according to tallies compiled by the BBC using Home Office data.

The spike in numbers has angered Britain, which accuses France of doing too little to stem the flow. Paris says that once migrants reach the shores of the channel, it is too late to prevent them crossing.

French police routinely tear up the camps that spring up between Calais and Dunkirk. Evictions at the Grande-Synthe site had been taking place on a weekly basis for the past few weeks, one charity worker said.

The migrants are typically transported to holding centers scattered across the country where they are encouraged to file for asylum, though many quickly make their way back to the Channel coast.

Hussein Hamid, 25, an Iranian Kurd, said it was the second time he had been evicted. On the first occasion, he was bussed to Lyon 760km to the south.

Hamid tried to leave the camp swiftly by foot, carrying a backpack, but said the police had blocked any way out.

An Iraqi Kurd told Reuters by text message that he was hiding nearby while the police conducted their operation.

“I’ll come back if they don’t find me,” he said, requesting anonymity to avoid police reprisals.

President Emmanuel Macron on Friday told Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson to “get serious” in the effort to curb migrant flows, as post-Brexit relations between their governments deteriorate.

(Reporting by Judith Jabkhiro; Writing by Richard Lough, Editing by Alex Richardson and Ed Osmond)

COVID-19 unrest has created ‘explosive’ situation in Guadeloupe, says Macron

By Ricardo Arduengo

POINTE-A-PITRE, Guadeloupe (Reuters) -President Emmanuel Macron said violence in Guadeloupe over COVID-19 restrictions had created a “very explosive” situation, as a general strike entered a second week on Monday and many stores remained shuttered after nighttime looting.

Hours before Macron’s prime minister and lawmakers from the Caribbean archipelago were to hold crisis talks in Paris, there were signs of protests spreading to Martinique, another French overseas territory 190 km (120 miles) south of Guadeloupe.

The unrest erupted last week over COVID curbs imposed by Paris, including the mandatory vaccination of health workers and health pass rules, but it has also revealed a deeper discontent over the relationship between some overseas territories and metropolitan France.

“We must explain, explain, explain and convince, convince, convince, because one must not play around with the peoples’ health,” Macron told reporters in northern France.

France has deployed 200 extra police officers, including elite police commandos, to Guadeloupe to quell the unrest.

The streets of Guadeloupe’s main city, Point-a-Pitre, were unusually quiet on Monday after a fourth straight night of trouble that was less intense than previous nights. Burned out cars and debris littered streets and most shops remained closed.

Local police have arrested several dozen people and food stores and pharmacies have been looted. French media reported on Sunday that rioters had broken into an arms depot in Pointe-a-Pitre and taken rifles.

“We just don’t know how far this will still go,” the mayor of Point-a-Pitre told France Info radio.

Guadeloupe has been hit by violent protests before, but he said there were “big worries” on the island now because rioters had guns. Schools were closed on Monday.

In Martinique, roads around some of the main commercial and industrial zones were by trucks blocked at sunrise as unionized workers responded to a strike call, local media reported.

(Reporting by Ricardo Arduengo in Point-a-Pitre, Tassilo Hummel and Richard Lough in Paris; Editing by Christian Lowe and Giles Elgood)

Biden meets with France’s Macron, calls U.S. ‘clumsy’ in submarine deal

By Jeff Mason and Michel Rose

ROME (Reuters) -President Joe Biden on Friday called U.S. government actions “clumsy” during his first meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron since a diplomatic crisis erupted last month over a U.S. security pact with Britain and Australia.

Biden used the meeting at the G20 summit in Rome, Italy, to try to turn the page on a relationship that came under strain over the U.S.-Australia security alliance, known as AUKUS, which also includes the United Kingdom. The pact effectively canceled a 2016 Australian-French submarine deal.

The U.S. decision to secretly negotiate a new agreement drew outrage from Paris. France temporarily recalled its ambassador from Washington, canceled a gala in the U.S. capital and officials accused Biden of acting like former President Donald Trump.

“I think what happened was, to use an English phrase, what we did was clumsy. It was not done with a lot of grace,” Biden said. “I was under the impression certain things had happened that hadn’t happened. And – but I want to make it clear: France is an extremely, extremely valued partner – extremely – and a power in and of itself.”

Biden also said the United States does not have an older and more loyal ally than France and that there is no place in the world where the United States cannot cooperate with France.

“I was under the impression that France had been informed long before that the deal was not going through. I, honest to God, did not know you had not been,” Biden told Macron.

Macron said his meeting with Biden was “important” and that it was essential to “look to the future” as his country and the United States work to mend fences.

“What really matters now is what we will do together in the coming weeks, the coming months, the coming years,” Macron said.

Since the rift erupted, Washington has taken several steps to fix the relationship.

Biden and Macron spoke to each other last week. Secretary of State Antony Blinken also visited Paris, where he acknowledged the United States could have “communicated better.” Vice President Kamala Harris also announced that she would travel to Paris in November and meet with Macron.

Biden and Macron met at the Villa Bonaparte, the French embassy to the Vatican, which a French diplomat said was a significant mark of goodwill from Biden.

“It’s an important gesture,” the French diplomat said, adding that the United States recognized that it underestimated the impact of its actions.

France now wants to see if Biden follows his words with actions. “Trust is being rebuilt. This is one step. Tokens of goodwill were given, we’ll see whether they follow through over the long term,” the diplomat said.

(Reporting by Jeff Mason and Michel Rose in Rome, Writing by Nandita Bose and Patricia Zengerle in Washington, Editing by Franklin Paul, Heather Timmons, David Gregorio and Marguerita Choy)

Protests in France against COVID-19 ‘health pass’ rules

PARIS (Reuters) -Police in Paris clashed with protesters railing against President Emmanuel Macron’s plan to require a COVID-19 vaccine certificate or negative PCR test to gain entry to bars, restaurants and cinemas from next month.

Macron this week announced sweeping measures to fight a rapid surge in new coronavirus infections, including the mandatory vaccination of health workers and new health pass rules for the wider public.

In doing so, he went further than most other European nations have done as the highly contagious Delta variant fans a new wave of cases, and other governments are watching carefully to see how the French public responds.

The police fired tear gas on several occasions as pockets of protesters overturned garbage cans and set a mechanical digger alight. Some protesters away from the skirmishes wore badges saying “No to the health pass”.

Some critics of Macron’s plan – which will require shopping malls, cafes, bars and restaurants to check the health passes of all patrons from August – accuse the president of trampling on freedoms and discriminating against those who do not want the COVID shot.

“It’s totally arbitrary and wholly undemocratic,” said one protester who identified himself as Jean-Louis.

Macron says the vaccine is the best way to put France back on the path to normalcy and that he is encouraging as many people as possible to get inoculated.

There were protests in other cities including Nantes, Marseille and Montpellier.

The show of discontent took place on Bastille Day, the anniversary of the 1789 storming of a medieval fortress in Paris which marked the turning point in the French Revolution.

Among other proposals in the government’s draft bill is the mandatory isolation for 10 days of anyone who tests positive, with police making random checks, French media reported. The prime minister’s office did not respond when asked to confirm the detail.

(Reporting by Christian Lowe and Gonzalo Fuentes; Writing by Richard Lough; Editing by Lisa Shumaker and Sandra Maler)

Pressuring junta, France suspends joint military operations with Malian forces

By Tangi Salaün

PARIS (Reuters) -France said on Thursday it was suspending its joint military operations with local troops in Mali as part of efforts to pressure the military junta there to restore a civilian-led government.

Mali’s military arrested interim President Bah Ndaw and Prime Minister Moctar Ouane last week and pressured them to resign, derailing a transition to democratic elections after another military coup last August.

Former vice president Assimi Goita, a colonel who led the August coup and last week’s revolt, was declared president on Friday.

West African regional bloc ECOWAS and the African Union have suspended Mali from their organizations and threatened sanctions.

“Pending these guarantees, France, after informing its partners and the Malian authorities, has decided to suspend, as a precaution and temporarily, joint military operations with the Malian forces, as well as national advisory missions that benefit them,” the Armed Forces Ministry said in a statement.

French forces will continue to operate in the country separately and the decision will be reassessed in the coming days, it added.

A spokesman for the Malian army declined to comment on what he termed a political matter.

France, the former colonial power, has more than 5,000 troops waging counter-insurgency operations against Islamist militants in Mali and the wider Sahel, an arid region of West Africa just below the Sahara desert.

Militants linked to al Qaeda and Islamic State have strengthened their foothold across the region, making large swathes of territory ungovernable and stoking ethnic violence, especially in Mali and Burkina Faso.

While France has hailed some success in recent months, the situation is extremely fragile and Paris has increasingly grown frustrated with no end in sight to its operations.

Speaking to the Journal du Dimanche newspaper, President Emmanuel Macron said on Sunday the latest power grab by the junta and any sign it plans to negotiate with Islamist militants could lead to a French withdrawal.

“I passed them the message that I would not stay alongside a country where there is no longer democratic legitimacy or transition,” he was quoted as saying.

(Reporting by Tangi Salaun in Paris; Additional reporting by John Irish in Paris and Paul Lorgerie in BamakoWriting by John Irish; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Matthew Lewis)

France’s Macron charts way out of third COVID-19 lockdown

By Elizabeth Pineau

PARIS (Reuters) -France will start relaxing a nightly curfew and allow cafes, bars and restaurants to offer outside service from May 19, as President Emmanuel Macron charts a way out of a third COVID-19 lockdown.

Macron, who is under pressure from business groups and a COVID-weary public to open up the economy again, announced in an interview with the regional papers a four-phase plan for unwinding France’s month-long stay-at-home order.

The easing will come despite the numbers of new daily cases and COVID-19 patients being treated in intensive care being far higher than when the two previous lockdowns were rolled back. Macron said the vaccine rollout made this possible.

“I have never gambled on the health and safety of our citizens,” Macron said. “I take responsibility for the choices I make, but these are never bets.”

The plan envisages the nightly curfew being pushed back to 2100 from 1900 CET from May 19 and to 2300 from June 9, before being scrapped completely on June 30.

Museums, cinemas and theatres will also be allowed to reopen on May 19. Foreign tourists with a “health pass” will be allowed to visit France again from June 9, according to the timetable published by Ouest France and other newspapers.

The timetable is provisional and could be delayed on a region-by-region basis in areas where intensive care units are close to saturation or the COVID-19 incidence rate exceeds 400 cases per 100,000 inhabitants.

‘EMERGENCY BRAKE’

“We will be able to pull an emergency brake in territories where the virus is too present,” Macron said.

The incidence rate in Paris and its surrounds was an average 459 per 100,000 people in the seven days up to April 25 and is falling, data showed. Ile de France is home to nearly a fifth of France’s population and accounts for 30% of economic activity.

About 22% of all French citizens have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, according to a Reuters tracker.

Accelerating the rollout in France, Europe and in developing countries is paramount to push back against the virus, Macron said.

Opening up the vaccine to more people in France, Macron said COVID shots would be made available to all obese adults from May 1.

Macron said France could use a digital or paper-based ‘health pass’ to help curb the spread of the virus at events with large crowds such as sport stadia or festivals. But he said it would not be right to use them at everyday venues like restaurants or cinemas.

“A health pass will never be a right of access that differentiates the French,” the president said. “As it pertains to public liberties, parliament will debate the matter.”

France’s main COVID-19 indicators all showed some signs of improvement on Wednesday, with the seven-day moving average of daily new infections falling to 27,366 compared with 38,000 when the lockdown began.

France has recorded 5.57 million COVID-19 cases and 103,947 deaths since the start of the pandemic.

(Reporting by Elizabeth Pineau; writing by Richard Lough; Editing by Gareth Jones and Sonya Hepinstall)

France kicks off Europe’s vaccine donations to poorer states

PARIS (Reuters) – France will donate an initial 100,000 doses of AstraZeneca’s COVID vaccine to developing countries this month, the first European Union member to send its own supplies to the COVAX initiative for poorer countries, an official said on Wednesday.

French President Emmanuel Macron has urged EU countries to send 5% of their own vaccine supplies to developing countries to hamper the development of new variants and stop Russia and China from gaining a diplomatic advantage by sharing their shots.

“France will inaugurate the European vaccine sharing mechanism with COVAX,” an adviser to Macron said on Wednesday. “We very much hope that other countries will commit to physically sharing vaccines with COVAX.”

The COVAX facility, backed by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), aims to secure 2 billion vaccine doses for lower-income countries by the end of 2021.

In March, it said the target was to deliver 237 million doses of AstraZeneca’s shot to 142 countries by the end of May, and it also shipped its first Pfizer shots.

French officials have expressed concern that developed countries around the globe, which are rushing to vaccinate their own population, have only committed cash to COVAX and refrained from sending doses from their own reserves.

France has committed to sending 500,000 doses by mid-June, the French adviser said. The first batch of AstraZeneca doses, taken from France’s own expected deliveries, will be sent to COVAX “imminently,” the adviser said.

(Reporting by Michel Rose; editing by Philippa Fletcher)

France sees biggest jump in COVID-19 intensive care patients in months

PARIS (Reuters) – France reported on Friday that 5,254 people were in intensive care units with COVID-19, an increase of 145 people in one day and the highest daily increase in five months.

New confirmed cases also jumped by the highest week-on-week rate since the end of November, when France was in its second nationwide lockdown.

The ministry reported 46,677 new cases, 6.2% more than a week ago, taking the total to 4.74 million cases.

For months, the government tried to contain the epidemic with a curfew and regional confinement measures. But faced with a rapidly-growing case count and pressure on the hospital system, President Emmanuel Macron ordered a new nationwide lockdown, starting next week.

France on Friday also reported 332 new deaths from COVID-19, taking the toll to 96,280, but the new death tally included only 32 deaths in retirement care homes over three days.

Death rates in retirement homes, which were several hundreds per week at the end of 2021, have dropped off sharply as the government focused its vaccination campaign on the elderly.

The health ministry reported on Friday that 12.13 million people had received a vaccine shot so far, including just over three million second doses and more than nine million first doses.

The nine million first doses amount to 13.6% of the population and 17.3% of the adult population.

By mid-April, the government will make vaccination available to people over 60.

(Reporting by Matthieu Protard and Geert De Clercq; Editing by Edmund Blair)

Macron orders COVID-19 lockdown across all of France, closes schools

By Sudip Kar-Gupta and Geert De Clercq

PARIS (Reuters) -President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday ordered France into its third national lockdown and said schools would close for three weeks as he sought to push back a third wave of COVID-19 infections that threatens to overwhelm hospitals.

With the death toll nearing 100,000, intensive care units in the hardest-hit regions at breaking point and a slower-than-planned vaccine rollout, Macron was forced to abandon his goal of keeping the country open to protect the economy.

“We will lose control if we do not move now,” the president said in a televised address to the nation.

His announcement means that movement restrictions already in place for more than a week in Paris, and some northern and southern regions, will now apply to the whole country for at least a month, from Saturday.

Departing from his pledge to safeguard education from the pandemic, Macron said schools will close for three weeks after this weekend.

Macron, 43, has sought to avoid a third large-scale lockdown since the start of the year, betting that if he could steer France out of the pandemic without locking the country down again he would give the economy a chance to recover from last year’s slump.

But the former investment banker’s options narrowed as more contagious strains of the coronavirus swept across France and much of Europe.

For school-children after this weekend, learning will be done remotely for a week, after which all schools go on a two-week holiday. Thereafter, nursery and primary pupils will return to school while middle and high school pupils continue distance learning for an extra week.

“It is the best solution to slow down the virus,” Macron said, adding that France had succeeded in keeping its schools open for longer during the pandemic than many neighbors.

Daily new infections in France have doubled since February to nearly 40,000. The number of COVID-19 patients in intensive care has breached 5,000, exceeding the peak hit during a six-week-long lockdown late last year.

Bed capacity in critical care units will be increased to 10,000, Macron said.

The new restrictions risk slowing the pace of recovery in the euro zone’s second-largest economy from last year’s slump.

Macron said the vaccine rollout needed to be accelerated. It is only now finding its stride three months in, with just 12% of the population inoculated.

(Additional reporting by Michel Rose and Jean-Stephane Brosse; Writing by Richard Lough; Editing by Christian Lowe)