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.”
