Another 1.2 million people took to the streets in France yesterday to protest against Emmanuel Macron’s plan to push back the age of retirement from 62 to 64. His prime minister, Elisabeth Borne, insisted at the weekend that his pension reforms are non-negotiable. We’ll see about that, was the response of the people, who for the second time in a fortnight demonstrated en masse.
But they are protesting about much more than just the pension reform. This is the culmination of six years of ras-le-bol (despair), the word one hears most frequently from the demonstrators. I have seen it countless times scrawled on placards, banners and on the yellow vests worn by those on the street.
There is another word frequently heard – ‘Macron’, and it’s not uttered with respect or admiration. It’s quite something to stand among thousands of Frenchmen and women as they chant as one ‘Macron démission’ (Macron, resign).
It’s quite something to stand among thousands of French as they chant as one ‘Macron, resign’
A poll this week revealed that 63 per cent of the French think their president is not up to the job. But this is as much about his character as his competency; the hatred millions feel for the head of state is visceral, and unsurprising.
Since the day of his election in May 2017, Macron made it plain he was the EU-loving president of globalisation. ‘I want France to be a start-up nation,’ he boasted to an audience of adoring techies, a month into his job. ‘A nation that thinks and moves like a start-up.’
Those who didn’t share his vision of France’s future were mocked. They were ‘slackers’, ‘stubborn Gauls’, and, most damning of all, ‘nothing’. In the autumn of 2018 Macron’s spokesman, Benjamin Griveaux, brushed off complaints about the imposition of a green fuel tax by sneering that those making a fuss were ‘people who smoke and drive diesel cars…not the 21st century France we want’.
The French have neither forgotten nor forgiven. Some Anglophone commentators made the mistake last year of believing Macron’s re-election was an endorsement of his presidency. It was nothing of the sort. He won because he was up against Marine Le Pen and the French couldn’t stomach the thought of her being their representative on the world stage at a time when Putin was on the march.
The legislative elections that followed were a true reflection of how the French felt Macron had performed on domestic issues such as the economy, immigration, law and order and the environment. His Renaissance party lost over 100 seats, depriving him of an absolute majority in the National Assembly. That’s what France thought of his centrist politics.
Instead, voters handed 89 seats to Le Pen’s National Rally Party, making it the second single biggest part in the Assembly, and 151 to Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s left-wing coalition of Socialists, Greens and Communists.
Economically, there is little to distinguish between Le Pen and Mélenchon, a pair of protectionists who blame globalism for France’s industrial decline. They also share a long-standing Euroscepticism.
When in 2005 France put the EU Constitution to a referendum, Mélenchon was the leading figure on the left within the ‘No’ campaign. As he said at the time, he opposed the constitution because it was ‘undemocratic, drawn up by a convention that no one elected…I don’t see how left-wing reformism is possible under these conditions’.
The centre-right in France, led by president Jacques Chirac, were in the vanguard of the Yes campaign but the far-right allied with Mélenchon. In a speech shortly before the vote, Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine’s father and the president of the National Front at the time, explained why he was against the constitution. He blamed the EU for the ‘unemployment that has taken hold in a structural manner, born of deindustrialisation…and aggravated by the massive arrival of immigrants, most of whom are increasing the number of people on social assistance’.
In a shock result, the referendum went the way of the No campaign, but what happened next has passed into infamy. Aided and abetted by Brussels, the French parliament ignored the result and passed the constitution – repackaged as the Lisbon Treaty – in 2007 without making the mistake this time of putting it to the people.
Those who voted against the referendum had, in general, been blue-collar workers, those without a university education and, perhaps most significantly, men and women who lived in the provinces. Polled a few days after the result, 52 per cent of No voters explained they had done so because they blamed the EU for their declining living standards.
The No demographic has been dubbed La France périphérique, and according to Jérôme Fourquet, one of the country’s top political scientists, they have become Macron’s bête noire. ‘The working class remains the socio-professional category most opposed,’ he said of the pension protests. Those least likely to be protesting are well-educated and well-paid white collar workers, who live in cities and enjoy their office work.
This divide is being exploited by Macron’s political opponents, particularly on the right. They accuse him of implementing the reforms at the behest of Brussels. In 2019, the EU Council recommended that France ‘reform the pension system to gradually standardise the rules of the various pension schemes’.
The commitment to reform pensions was included in France’s national recovery and resilience plan, submitted post-Covid to the European Commission in 2021. Marine Le Pen has lately accused the EU of ‘blackmail’, implying that the €40 billion (£35.3 billion) funding for which France has applied from Brussels Recovery plan is contingent on the Republic reforming its pension system.
This is a fallacy. Reform has been on Macron’s agenda since he took office in 2017 and he first tried tinkering with pensions in 2019 before Covid sent France into lockdown. Nonetheless, Le Pen’s spurious claim will only further inflame passions among the many Eurosceptic protestors.
Macron admitted in a BBC interview in January 2018 that if given the chance to follow Britain out of the EU the French electorate probably would. Until that opportunity arises, France’s Non voters will keep protesting against a political establishment they believe acts in the best interest of Brussels and not theirs.
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