CINTEGABELLE, Dec 6: Almost 2,000 French gendarmes marched through the streets of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin’s constituency on Thursday, stepping up an unprecedented labour protest in the run-up to national elections this spring.

Singing the “Marseillaise” national anthem, the paramilitary police defied a ban on demonstrations by members of the armed forces to parade through the streets of Cintegabelle, the small southwestern town that Jospin represents in parliament.

Some then filed in silence past his local constituency office, although the prime minister was not there but in Paris.

“We haven’t come to declare war on the prime minister but just to tell him we are unhappy,” said a spokesman for the gendarmes, a military corps organized by Napoleon 200 years ago.

In a television interview on Wednesday night in which he acknowledged for the first time he would probably challenge conservative President Jacques Chirac for the presidency in five months’ time, the Socialist Jospin urged the protesters to remember that their military status forbade demonstrations.

Gendarmes, immediately recognizable by their traditional box-shaped caps or kepis, complain that a dire shortage of resources and manpower is making their jobs more dangerous and compromising their ability to ensure law and order.

With rising crime statistics a major public concern ahead of both the presidential and parliamentary elections due within weeks of each other, both the gendarmes and civilian police officers with similar grievances have wide public sympathy.

“Lionel Jospin doesn’t care about us. He promises things on television but he should have taken care of this problem a long time ago,” said one gendarme in Cintegabelle.

PROTESTS ELSEWHERE: Another 3,000 gendarmes gathered in eastern city of Lyon and hundreds joined smaller protests around the country.