Violence in France

89,000 troops! Do you think that will be enough, Macron? Violence expected in tomorrow's protests in France; something about climate change and taxes.

Ace explains the politics.

Macron's just-invented party, En Marche!, has an outright of majority of seats in the assembly so this vote will probably fail.

A no-confidence vote can only be lodged against the government, headed by the PM Edouard Phillippe, and not the head of state, who is the President, Macron.

In France, Presidents are elected directly by the people every five years. They do not depend on legislative support and are not elected by the legislature. They cannot then be tossed out of office by a no-confidence vote.

The actual government -- the Prime Minister and other Ministers -- are, however, proposed by the President and then voted on by the legislature. So they do rely on legislative support.

So the PM Phillipe, the Minister of the Interior Castaner, etc., could be in danger due to a no-confidence vote. Macron would just have to reshuffle the cabinet and bring in a few new people while kicking old ones out and submit them for approval by the legislature.

As that article I translated yesterday mentioned, there is already talk that Phillipe might be on his way out, and talk that an even larger reshuffling is coming. This was before the report of a no-confidence vote. The source said that if Saturday's protests are violent, we could see Macron forced to shake up the government -- "In the best case, by the time of the European elections, in the worst case, by Christmas."

Flashball: There's a lot of controversy over the police's use of a less-lethal weapon called the flash-ball or flashball, which fires a rubber projectile with a lot of stopping power. French police use them for riot control.

A high school girl in Grenoble was just hit in the face with one of these and injured ("disfigured," her mother says).

Just something that might come up tomorrow. I figure, about a 90% chance that there are tweets complaining of flash-balls, and then someone from the stupid, stupid media and the Pretend Junior Media, Vox, guesses it's an incendiary round.

It's not a flash-bang as one might guess.

Read more here.