On Friday, around 30 anti-government militants gathered outside the Theatre Des Bouffes du Nord after M Macron and his wife Brigitte had arrived to watch a performance of La Mouche (The Fly). The Macrons’ presence was flagged on Twitter by journalist and political activist Taha Bouhafs, who was sat three rows behind them.
M Bouhafs tweeted photos of the president and asked his tens of thousands of followers whether he should hurl his shoe at him, in a nod to the famous gesture by an Iraqi reporter against US President George W. Bush in 2008.
“I’m kidding … the security is looking at me weirdly right now,” M Bouhafs said.
Videos posted on social media showed protesters chanting “Macron resign” and at one point trying to enter the venue. But the Paris police chief later confirmed that the demonstrators had not actually managed to break in.
France’s Interior Minister on Saturday denounced the acts of violence in recent protests against the planned overhaul of the pension system after militants tried to storm their way into a Paris theatre where President Emmanuel Macron attended a show with his wife.
“The acts of violence and intimidation … committed in recent days call for a firm and unambiguous response,” Christophe Castaner said in a Twitter post.
“These violations will never be a form of expression in a democracy. Dialogue creates a richer debate; violence tarnishes the debate,” he continued.
Junior Finance Minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher also lashed out at the rioters, slamming the incident as an “attack on democracy”.
“Such actions are anti-democratic. The minority is fighting the majority,” she told Europe 1 radio later on Saturday.
M Bouhafs was later arrested and taken into police custody overnight on the grounds he had acted to incite both damage to property and violence. An investigation has since been launched.
But while Friday’s incident sparked outrage among M Macron’s inner circle, it was dismissed as trivial by his critics.
“We shouldn’t be acting as though the country is at war, because it isn’t!” far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon told LCI television. “We shouldn’t take things so seriously and must stop over-dramatising the situation.”
M Mélenchon, president of the leftist La France Insoumise party, said the militants who attempted to storm the theatre “are ordinary people who see Emmanuel Macron as an arrogant monarch,” before warning the president against “showing contempt” for the French.
M Macron has mostly stayed out of the crisis over his planned overhaul of France’s unwieldy retirement system, leaving his prime minister Edouard Philippe to face unions during six weeks of crippling transport stoppages.
But with support for the strike action waning, opponents of the pension reform and unions have staged more direct action.
The headquarters of the moderate CFDT union, which the government has been trying to woo, was invaded on Friday by activists from other, more hardline unions, while Paris’ Louvre Museum was blocked by striking staff.
The government wants to merge the country’s 42 separate pension regimes into a single, points-based system under which for each euro contributed, every pensioner would have equal rights.
M Macron insists the changes will make the system fairer and more sustainable; but critics say they will effectively force millions of people to work longer for a smaller pension.
The government had also hoped to create incentives to encourage people to work longer, notably by raising the age at which a person can draw a full pension from 62 to 64, but unions forced it to drop this measure.
M Macron, however, has shown no sign of bowing to the demand of hardline unions that he abandon the reform altogether.