Emmanuel Macron’s winter of discontent 

Having become accustomed to the month-long Paris public transport strike I found myself walking home the other week, through Place de la Nation in the south-east of the city, where a demonstration was under way. The stand-off seemed as unremarkable and ritualised as usual. Good-natured even, with firemen and police posing together for selfies.

An hour later things were not so good-natured, though they remained ritualised. Cracks rang out and smoke rose, as France’s feared CRS (Compagnies républicaines de sécurité) riot police began to fire teargas at the firemen, following scenes of hand-to-hand fighting.

Back in 2009, the then president of France Nicolas Sarkozy remarked: “These days when there’s a strike in France, nobody notices.”

Whatever was the case in 2009, people are certainly taking notice now. December 2019 to January 2020 saw the longest public transport strike in French history. With mass walkouts in other sectors of the economy, it would scarcely be an overstatement to say the economy was crippled. Suburbs endured brownouts as power stations were shut down and the gilets jaune social movement, admittedly much reduced, continued to protest more than a year after it was founded.

Still, Emmanuel Macron held his nerve, letting the strikes drag on, banking on the fact that while the disruption was significant, the numbers of strikers were not. Indeed, French unions strike due to weakness rather than strength: with a membership density of only eight to eleven per cent, French unions lag behind even British ones in terms of popular participation. In the private sector, union density is as low as five per cent. As a result, all the unions can do is strike.

Public support for the strike was high, though, at over 51 per cent. Over a million euros poured into strike funds in donations, from members of the public who, though they may not be as well protected as those in unionised jobs, fear that the axe will come for them in the end.

The reforms at the centre of the strike will probably sound trivial to British readers, but they do illuminate a yawning chasm at the heart of French politics. President Macron and his Prime Minister, Édouard Philippe, want to reorganise the public pension system, both raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 and replacing the current 42 separate pension pots with a British-style single state pension.

Strikers said no, and the public was torn in both directions.

The transport strike that brought most of the country to a standstill has now ended—though the union will “remain mobilised”, and Macron’s woes are not over. Many expect Paris in the spring to be, well, Paris in the spring.

Even normally inert sectors of society are grumbling. For example, scientists and university researchers are objecting to the government’s planned reorganisation of research policy. To the extent that the strikes and protests were reported in Britain, it was through a rather unhelpful Anglocentric prism: amusement at the idea that ballet dancers and lawyers would take to the streets, or a counterpoint to the lack of friction around Brexit. An amuse bouche for foreign journalists that has long stuck in the craw of those over here who expect serious reporting.

Édouard Philippe did offer some concessions to strikers, offering to “temporarily” forget about raising the pension age, but the most militant union, the CGT, refused to bite. The stakes got higher still when firemen pretended to immolate themselves at another confrontation with police. Make no mistake, this was purely for show, even if inspired by such examples as the Buddhist monk Quang Duc, who set himself alight in Saigon in 1963. Nonetheless, even as a gesture it was remarkable.

But unpopular as he is, Macron is in no immediate danger. Having vanquished all in the 2017 election, even though he himself was unpopular at the time, there is no political challenge for him to face. As a result, it is hard to see how the next presidential election will play out.

The Socialist party, beaten into the ground by Macron in 2017, is still in crisis and shows no signs of recovering, perhaps ever. The far-Left, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Unbowed, is noisy but is never going to win a presidential election: popular with young people, it suffers from the traditional far-Left vice of having only a rhetorical connection to the working people in whose name it stands.

The centre-Right Republican party, while not as badly bruised as the Socialists, will find it hard to differentiate itself from Macron. Every difficulty Macron has faced, every protest, every strike, is a re-run of those already endured by the Republicans (then called the UMP). From the 1995 general strikes against public sector reform to those against Sarkozy’s 2007 attempt to cut union power and the 2010 attempt to raise the retirement age to 67, all of these battles have already been fought — and lost — by the former Gaullist party.

The mayor of the eastern French city of Troyes, François Baroin, seems an attractive candidate for the Republicans’ next presidential,campaign: youngish, good-looking, and, unlike so many previous candidates, not accused of financial crimes. But it is hard to see how the Republicans could put clear blue water between themselves and Macron.

The far-Right leader Marine Le Pen should be the obvious beneficiary. Yet she has been unable to capitalise on the widespread frustration.

Of course, Le Pen was always going to find it difficult to piggyback on a revolt by an organised labour movement that gets up early in the morning so that it can have extra time in the day to hate her, but she also failed to make hay from the popular, but loose and disorganised, gilets jaune movement. And that came after not only expelling her Jew-bating, openly racist father from her party and changing its name from National Front to National Rally.

In short, France is in political stasis. Politics plays out on the streets because there is nowhere else for any meaningful participation, and the President is both the author and beneficiary of this political vacuum.

Macron won in 2017 only by default: in the run-off against Le Pen he was the more acceptable option. But how many times can the French electorate have a gun marked “Le Pen” put to its head?