French dockworkers strike over budget measures and militarisation of ports

French ports are expected to be almost completely shut down on Friday as dockworkers join a 24-hour strike across 22 countries to protest against the use of ports for arms exports. French workers are also demonstrating against proposed measures in the country's draft budget.


Issued on: 30/10/2026 - RFI

Activity at Le Havre – France's largest container port – is expected to grind to a halt on Friday as dockworkers go on strike. AFP - ROBERT FRANCOIS

Friday's strike, originally called by dockworkers' unions in France, Italy, Greece, Spain's Basque country, Turkey and Morocco, is now backed by more than 25 unions in 113 ports.

The protest is expected to target major shipping hubs across Europe and beyond, including Le Havre, Dunkirk and Calais in France, Hamburg, Valencia, Algeciras, Piraeus and Genoa, as well as Morocco's Tangier Med and India's Nhava Sheva.

Organisers say it could disrupt more than 40 percent of Mediterranean cargo and $2 billion worth of freight.

In France, ports will be “95 percent shut down” on Friday, said Tony Hautbois, secretary-general of the CGT Ports and Docks union. Workers have been instructed not to load or unload any cargo.




The union represents 95 percent of dockworkers and 87.5 percent of all port-handling workers nationally.

Most terminals in France will not operate for 24 hours on Friday, said Jean-Frédéric Laurent, director-general of the French Ports Association.

Budget measures under fire

French ports handled 330 million tonnes of goods in 2025, accounting for between 7 and 8 percent of the European total.

Around 14,000 port workers, including 7,500 dockworkers, are affected by the strike call.

The union is protesting against measures in the French government's draft budget, which it says “destroy our solidarity systems”.

In a statement issued on Wednesday, the union said it would also join a nationwide strike on 5 November, called by the CGT and other major trade union confederations representing public and private sector workers.

The unions are demanding an increase in the minimum wage and higher salaries rather than bonuses which don't contribute to social security coverage.

They say they are also mobilising to defend young people, the future of public education, social security, hospitals and pensioners.

Militarisation of ports

Friday's strike was initially called at European level by the European Dockworkers Council (EDC) and internationally by other dockworkers' federations, including in Turkey and India.

In May ⁠2026, dockworkers' unions from 35 European countries published the so-called Istanbul Declaration refusing that port facilities "become a link in the chain" of wars by transporting weapons destined for war zones.

Italian harbours, with Genoa at the forefront, have ​played a leading role in protests against arms shipments, frequently blocking cargo shipments bound for Israel ​and for US ⁠military bases.

French dockers refuse to load cargo of machine gun parts bound for Israel

Over the 2021-2025 period, Europe became the world's biggest arms importer, data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute showed earlier this year.

"From planes to tanks, guns to bullets, explosives to ammunition, uniforms to boots, our ports have become replenishing and forwarding bases for war and ⁠genocide," ​unions said, announcing the strike.

What is France's 'great replacement' conspiracy theory and how is it spreading?

A week after shootings in the Paris suburbs of Trappes and La Verrière that are being investigated as a terrorist attack motivated by race, the mayor of Trappes has called for the "great replacement" theory – which claims white French people are being deliberately replaced by non-Europeans – to be banned by law.


Issued on: 30/10/2026 - RFI

Supporters of the far-right Reconquete party, led by Eric Zemmour, hold up signs reading "Defend our civilisation" at a party meeting near Lyon, in 2024. AP - Laurent Cipriani

By: Alison Hird


Mayor Ali Rabeh wants France to make promoting the "great replacement" theory a criminal offence.

He proposes amending France’s 1881 press law to punish people who portray a group as part of a process of population replacement because of their origin, religion, ethnicity or supposed race. He argues that existing penalties for racist speech are insufficient.

His proposal follows an attack in his town, a suburb west of Paris, in which a 26-year-old black French man, Pengo Bossio Wangi, was killed and seven people were injured.

The 39-year-old suspect, Kévin Tessier, has been charged and remanded in custody. Investigators are treating the case as a suspected terrorist attack motivated by the victims’ actual or perceived race, ethnicity, nationality or religion.

Tessier is reported to have told investigators: "I can no longer stand being invaded, doing nothing about it."

"The words of the terrorist are clear," Rabeh told FranceInfo on Friday, "This reflects very precisely the logic of the great replacement theory."

The mayor also accused the far-right National Rally (RN) party of helping to create the ideological climate behind the attack, although that accusation has not been established as part of the investigation.
'Genocide by substitution'

French writer and intellectual Renaud Camus coined and popularised the expression "great replacement" in his 2011 book Le Grand Remplacement.

The theory purports that an elitist group is colluding against white French and European people to replace them with non-Europeans, particularly people from Africa and the Middle East, many of them Muslim.

In an interview in February with right-wing talk show host André Bercoff, Camus said: "The great replacement is not a theory. It’s a crime and a dreadful fact that nobody denies anymore."

The writer said people who talk about immigration "are in fact collaborators in the genocide by substitution," adding that he was "very much in favour of remigration".

In April 2014, a Paris court convicted Camus over remarks made at a December 2010 event – the International Conference on the Islamisation of Our Countries – fining him €4,000 and awarding €500 in damages to the NGO the Movement Against Racism and for Friendship Between Peoples.

The court found he had presented Muslims as “invading warriors” whose aim was the destruction and replacement of the French people, and that his language urged listeners to resist the supposed “invader".

The Paris Court of Appeal confirmed the conviction in April 2015.

Then in 2020 he was convicted over tweets he posted and a public speech targeting immigrants of African origin. He received a two-month suspended prison sentence and was ordered to pay €1,800 to the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism and SOS Racisme.

He was acquitted of this charge on appeal in March 2022.

Renaud Camus published "The Great Replacement" in 2011, claiming the populations of France and other European nations are being supplanted by non-white migrants. AP - Oleg Cetinic

Roots in anti-Semitism

Camus did not invent great replacement ideology, which draws on fears around immigration, racial mixing and the perceived loss of national identity that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Historians say such ideas were frequently expressed through anti-Semitism and anxieties about colonial populations.

“Renaud Camus conceptualised it and brought it into political discourse,” said Yvan Gastaut, a historian at Cote d’Azur university. “But we find this concept, for example, in Edouard Drumont’s La France juive ["Jewish France"] in 1886.”

In 1900, Maurice Barrès, the father of French nationalism, gave further traction to the concept at a time when France was deeply divided over the wrongful conviction of Jewish artillery officer Captain Alfred Dreyfus.

Writing in Le Journal, Barrès warned that low French birth rates, wartime losses and immigration by "new French people" would lead to an "invasion" of French territory and blood that would "ruin our homeland".

Barrès, a high-profile anti-Dreyfusard and anti-Semite, was chiefly targeting Jewish immigration and influence.

"Anti-Semitism was extremely mainstream," Aurelien Mondon, a political scientist at the University of Bath, told France 24. "Barrès spoke about the idea of racial purity," – which the Nazis went on to popularise during the Second World War.

Mondon argues that after the War, parts of the European far right increasingly shifted away from explicit claims of racial superiority towards arguing that different cultures should remain separate.

France moves to dissolve group run by anti-Semitic ideologue Alain Soral

Theory enters public debate

In France, the theory has become increasingly visible in debates and discussions about immigration and national identity.

Éric Zemmour, the far-right pundit and former presidential candidate, who hopes to run again in 2027, has disseminated the great replacement theory in his books Le Suicide Français ("French Suicide") and Destin Français ("French Destiny").

Valérie Pécresse, the conservative candidate in the 2022 presidential election, also sparked controversy by referring to the theory during a campaign rally.

“The great replacement theory has indeed entered public debate,” Nicolas Bancel, a historian specialising in colonialism, told Public Sénat. “Previously favoured mainly by far-right figures such as Éric Zemmour, it has gradually shifted towards the mainstream right."

The debate intensified in September this year when Aurore Bergé, France’s anti-discrimination minister, declined to describe the theory as racist.

While acknowledging it was factually false and misleading, she said: "I think classifying it as racist would mean we’re not allowed to discuss it. I’d prefer to fight it."

Bancel disagrees. "To say that this theory is not racist is false, because its originators have never concealed that fact. The racial component is at the heart of this theory.”

Bergé's position also drew criticism from politicians in her own camp. "Aurore Bergé, you explain that a racist theory is to be debated like a political opinion? Racism is a crime," wrote Prisca Thévenot, an MP with President Macron’s Renaissance group.

Weapon of the alt-right

While historians and researchers reject the theory’s central claim that demographic change is evidence of a coordinated plan to replace white Europeans, it has gained traction internationally – particularly in the United States, where it has become associated with the alt-right and white nationalist movements.

After tens of thousands of African migrants reached the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in July this year, Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News presenter who now hosts an anti-establishment online podcast, released a video promising to tell viewers who was really behind "the invasion".

"The great replacement is no longer a theory," he said, introducing a discussion on Ceuta with Holocaust denier Darryl Cooper, who has claimed that the millions of deaths in Nazi concentration camps were the unplanned result of logistical failures amid wartime chaos rather than a planned genocide.

The US version of France's great replacement theory is often referred to as "white genocide".

"It's a very protean idea," Matthew Feldman, an expert on fascism and white supremacy, told The Daily Telegraph. "It has been used to attack blacks, Latinos, Jews and Muslims. It's perfect for the racist, as it ties together everybody who isn't white, plus the Jews, in one grand, poisonous concept."

Valérie Igounet, a historian and deputy director of the French organisation Conspiracy Watch, described it as “a theory which is unambiguously xenophobic and conspiratorial”.

“It has led to terrorist attacks,” she says, citing the 2019 Christchurch massacre in New Zealand, when gunman Brenton Tarrant killed 51 people at two mosques. He entitled his manifesto "The Great Replacement".

Other such attacks include the 2011 shooting of 77 people at a Labour Party youth summer camp on the Norwegian island of Utoya, and the 2018 killing of 11 Jewish worshippers in Pittsburgh.

 

US measles surge reminds of Europe’s vaccination gaps

By Giedre Peseckyte

Published on 29 October 2026 - EURONEWS

The US risks losing its measles elimination status as under-vaccinated communities across Europe remain vulnerable to imported cases.

The United States is at risk of losing its measles-free status as cases surge, raising fresh concerns about the vulnerability of European communities where vaccination coverage remains below the level needed to prevent sustained transmission.

More than 4,500 cases have been reported in the US this year — roughly twice the total reported last year. A forecast published in JAMA suggests that measles could become endemic again in the US if vaccination rates fail to improve, potentially resulting in 851,300 cases, more than 170,000 hospitalisations and 2,550 deaths over 25 years.

The outbreak across the Atlantic could also signal a wider risk, Kitty Mohan, vice-president of the Standing Committee of European Doctors (CPME) and its rapporteur on vaccination, told Euronews.

“Due to international travel routes and the ease and speed at which people move across borders, combined the infectiousness of measles before the rash starts, people can travel quite far whilst infectious and so the disease can spread rapidly,” Mohan said.

Measles is among the most contagious infectious diseases. People can transmit the virus for around four days before the characteristic rash appears, meaning they may travel across borders before realising they are ill.

“15 mins face to face with someone who is infectious will mean you are likely to get measles,” Mohan said.

The US is not the only country where measles continues to circulate. The biggest outbreaks currently are in Bangladesh, with cases surpassing 65,430, Indonesia with 46,578 and Guatemala with 31,222 cases.

“Whether an imported case leads to further transmission in Europe depends primarily on immunity levels in the affected community in Europe and whether the virus reaches groups with low vaccination coverage,” the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) told Euronews.

Vaccination coverage was 92% for the first dose and 88% for the second dose — a “strong population protection,” ECDC said.

But that remains below the recommended 95% two-dose coverage needed at national and local levels to prevent sustained transmission and achieve measles elimination. National averages can also conceal areas or communities with lower vaccination coverage.

“Most measles cases occur in unvaccinated people,” the ECDC said, recommending that countries close immunity gaps, ensure both vaccine doses are administered on time, offer catch-up vaccination to eligible adolescents and adults, and maintain strong surveillance and outbreak-response systems.

The consequences extend beyond those who can choose to get vaccinated. Infants who are too young to receive the vaccine, as well as people who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons or whose immune systems cannot mount an adequate response, depend on high levels of immunity in the wider population.

“Herd immunity or maintaining vaccination rates above a threshold would protect these groups - so lower rates make them more susceptible to disease,” Mohan said.

Relate

Pockets of low coverage

The problem is not confined to countries with low national vaccination rates. Clusters of unvaccinated or under-vaccinated people can emerge within otherwise well-protected populations, creating local conditions in which outbreaks can take hold.

Coverage gaps can reflect a range of factors, including difficulties accessing vaccination services, limited information or awareness, and concerns about vaccines.

“There are traditional risk groups - such as traveller communities and some religious groups who historically have been reluctant to vaccinate,” said Mohan.

However, ECDC underlined that “the presence of a group of unvaccinated people does not automatically mean that a large outbreak will spread across the wider population,” using the Urkult festival in northern Sweden as an example. The outbreak at the festival occurred between 30 July and 2 August this year, mainly affecting unvaccinated children and adolescents. It involved 28 cases, including 12 secondary cases, but did not lead to sustained transmission in the wider population.

"The fact that there were relatively few secondary cases among those exposed at the festival is due to the high level of immunity within the population, a result of strong participation in the childhood vaccination program," said Johanna Rubin, Acting Head of the Vaccination Unit at Sweden’s public health agency.

“This once again highlights the importance of high community-level protection,” ECDC said.

For now, the risk for Europeans remains the same, ECDC said, as per its latest assessment, with the overall risk set as moderate for infants under 12 months, children aged one to five and immunocompromised people. For older unvaccinated children and adults, the risk is estimated to range from low to moderate. People with immunity from vaccination or previous infection are considered to have a low risk of measles.

ECDC surveillance data indicate fewer reported measles cases in 2026 than in 2025, although 2026 figures remain preliminary and should be interpreted with caution.

Measles is endemic in twelve European countries: Bosnia and Herzegovina, France, Georgia, Germany, Italy, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Poland, Romania, Russia, Türkiye, and Ukraine.

Romania reported most of the cases, with numbers reaching 30,692 in 2024, up from 3,371 in 2023.

Six European countries: Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Uzbekistan have re-established endemic measles transmission based on the number of cases in 2024 earlier this year.

 

Climate change should be declared health emergency as health risks can no longer be ignored

By Marta Iraola Iribarren

Published on 28 October 2026

EURONEWS

Climate change should be declared a global health emergency as its impacts intensify faster than action to address them, authors of a major new report warn.

Climate change has become an escalating chronic global health emergency, with health risks and impacts increasing rapidly since the Paris Agreement entered into force in 2016, according to the latest Lancet Countdown report.

Therefore, the authors of the report are calling on the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations as a whole to formally declare climate change a global health emergency.

They argue that a formal emergency designation would shift global climate action from slow, voluntary commitments to mandatory, coordinated emergency management.

This would lead to strengthened health surveillance and early warning systems, mobilised resources rapidly, established legally binding accountability mechanisms and introduced preventive public health measures.

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A measure, they consider, would reflect the scale of the threat.

“As populations grow and age, more people are at risk today than a decade ago, further increasing the scale and urgency of the adaptation task,” the authors wrote.

The report's indicators show that, since the Paris Agreement entered into force, climate-related health risks and impacts have not only increased but have also accelerated across multiple areas compared with the previous decade.

These include some heat-related health risks, drought incidence, extreme precipitation and climatic suitability for dengue transmission. The faster pace of these changes suggests that existing measures are insufficient to protect public health.

Other proposed measures include an immediate global ban on new fossil fuel exploration and exploitation, the complete phase-out of coal-fired power generation by 2035, and a shift towards predominantly plant-based diets.

Related

• Europe's heatwaves are fuelling infectious diseases, health agency warns

Climate - related health threats continue to grow

Despite efforts to tackle climate change, greenhouse gas emissions continue to reach record highs. Climate change is increasingly affecting health and threatening lives worldwide, while the window of opportunity to avoid a potentially catastrophic future is rapidly closing.

The past 11 years have been the hottest on record, the report noted, while annual heat-related deaths have risen by nearly 36% over recent decades.

In 2023 alone, heat was linked to a record 710,000 deaths, with more than 70% of these deaths attributable to human-caused climate change.

Climate change is also making conditions more suitable for the transmission of vector-borne diseases, including dengue and Zika.

Extreme weather and wildfires are also increasingly threatening human health, particularly among vulnerable populations and in regions with limited capacity to respond to climate-related impacts.

Against this backdrop, the authors say an urgent change of approach is needed “to change course and protect the health and survival of present and future generations.”