The French public’s rage isn’t just over pension reform, but over a state that is no longer able to deliver what people expect
Source - Daily Telegraph - 25/03/23
More than the figures themselves – nearly 500 police officers injured, the same amount of arrests, firemen battling almost 1,000 blazes on France’s eighth day of action last Thursday – it’s the embrace of guerrilla-levels of violence by a radicalised fringe of protesters that doomed King Charles’ state visit to France. What started last autumn as the expected pushback against a relatively unambitious reform of France’s national pensions system – Emmanuel Macron’s second attempt since 2019 – has morphed into what the French call a jacquerie, after the warlike peasant revolts of the Middle Ages.
Television analysts will discuss at length the iniquity of raising the pension age by two years, in a country where life expectancy has soared by 15 years since the system was set up in 1945. School-age adolescents, the posher the more virulent, have taken to the streets over concerns that will impact them half a century in the future. (A group of marchers from École Alsacienne, the most exclusive private school in Paris, carried signs announcing their own strike, presumably on their parents’ dime.) Yet the anger goes far beyond pensions: it’s a rejection of both Macron himself and the supposed “new world” he campaigned on. Triggered mostly by sharp cost of living increases and by the uncertainty born from two years of Covid restrictions, it’s a seismic change in France: a lack of trust not just in the government, but in the French state, until now disliked but respected as competent.
It takes a bit of time to fully accept the breadth of state influence in French society. The French are the most taxed citizens of the EU, and grumble about it; but the unspoken pact always was that citizens would enjoy good public services, from a vaunted health system to generous benefits, dole payments, quality schooling, social housing, etc. The state interferes in corporate deals, rules on the side of a protective employment legal framework, and happily flouts Brussels regulations to favour French companies (and pays the ensuing fines years later).
All of this is fine until the state stops providing what the French have been expecting as a natural right – and this is now seen as having broken down, under the presidency of possibly the most technocratic mandarin in the country’s history. Macron’s career was almost entirely in the civil service, barring two years during which he worked for a merchant bank as a door opener to the upper reaches of the Ministry of Finance. He had never stood for election until he took it into his head to run for president. He speaks only technocratese, seemingly looking down at the rest of the French.
The French, for their part, have seen their “advantages” (length of unemployment pay, pension amount as well as retirement age, child benefit) whittled down. French trains now routinely come in late (the delays on wartime Ukrainian railways shame the SNCF average), branch lines have been cancelled. Even the conservative president of the Ile-de-France (Paris) region, Valérie Pécresse, recently took the tin-eared decision to reduce the number of buses and Métro trains to save pennies, while new Ulez regulations have made using one’s car far harder and more expensive.
And so the ugly rage erupting at every level will be difficult to tamp down, even should Macron pull the bill rather than suffer ignominious defeat in a “public initiative” referendum that seems increasingly likely to be voted in by enough citizens: it only requires four-million signatures; twice that number would likely sign. No one will be grateful if Macron does cancel his reform. Protesters will see it as blood in the water. They will keep circling the Elysée, while the hostage inside strives vainly to send out rescue notes.
Comments
Post a Comment