Citizens frustrated by the president’s top-down approach to crisis management are chafing against the latest restrictions
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It’s not quite a lockdown, but the new measures announced by President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday come pretty close. Starting this Saturday, Paris and eight other metropolitan areas, home to some 20 million people, will see curfews imposed on all non-essential activity between 9pm and 6am for at least four weeks.
With France now well into its second wave of Covid-19 – the last week has seen 120,000 new cases alongside a steady uptick in hospitalisations – fresh restrictions had come to be seen as inevitable. Still, as the shower of criticism from across the political spectrum has made clear, that hasn’t made the new measures any less grating.
