Farid Hafez @fhafez.bsky.social

🇫🇷 Huge crowds marched peacefully through Paris on Saturday after authorities changed the protest's approved route at the last minute, a move the leftist leader of France Unbowed Jean-Luc Mélenchon called a deliberate attempt to provoke "disorder." Mélenchon said the government switched the route while the country was in shock over Friday's shooting in Trappes, a working-class suburb west of Paris. A gunman there killed a 26-year-old man and wounded several others, including a 12-year-old girl, in what President Emmanuel Macron described as a terrorist and racist act. Mélenchon, the top left-wing candidate in polls for next year's presidential election, also listed what he called a series of provocations by Macron’s government. The march's original starting point was banned. Soldiers from Sentinelle, France's anti-terror patrol force, were posted outside public buildings despite having no crowd-control training. And the Paris police chief told shopkeepers to hire private security. "They are doing absolutely everything to provoke an incident," he said, while praising marchers' "collective discipline." He warned Macron and Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu to meet protesters' demands before a nationwide general strike called by the CGT, one of France's biggest labor unions, for Nov. 5. "Either Mr. Macron gives in right away, or he will have to do so under much more hazardous conditions," he said. Macron met high school student organizations for the first time Friday, after more than a month of protests, and Lecornu is set to meet them Monday.