Macron’s pyrrhic victory: pensions, strikes and divisions
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To the British public, there is nothing newsworthy about the French going on strike. This is especially so when there is enough to worry about with the almost unprecedented wave of public sector strikes at home. But, as a British student on his year abroad in Paris, I have been directly affected by the French strikes, with mountains of uncollected rubbish piling up the streets, almost becoming part of the city’s furniture. I have also witnessed how these latest strikes over pensions are symptomatic of a profoundly divided country.
Last Thursday, Emmanuel Macron’s government pushed a highly controversial pension reform through the National Assembly, without seeking parliamentary approval. The special Clause 49.3 of the French Constitution enables the government to pass laws without facing a parliamentary vote. In the months leading up to this, strikers vowed to “paralyse the country”. Just minutes after the government’s announcement to the Assembly that it was going to proceed with the reform without holding a vote, violent protests erupted in Paris and other French cities. Since Thursday, not one day has gone by without ad hoc protests flaring up in the capital, with huge numbers of police vehicles racing from one end of the city to the other, in an attempt to contain the next gathering.
On paper, the introduction of this reform is a major win for Macron. Reforming the French pension system has been his top priority since 2017 and successive crises — first the Gilets Jaunes (yellow vests) movement, then the pandemic — have repeatedly delayed it. In practice, however, forcing this reform through will only further divide an already splintered country. Macron, many will argue, has never had the legitimacy to rule the country, as he was elected by many to bar the far-Right candidate Marine Le Pen from the presidency. “We did not vote for him, but against Marine Le Pen,” is a sentence that I have seen and heard time and again in recent weeks.
Additionally, in 2022 Macron lost his parliamentary majority, which further weakened his position. Now with this reform, opposed by more than two-thirds of the country, Macron has never been so unpopular. On the Monday following the introduction of the reform, Macron’s government barely survived a vote of no confidence by a mere 9 votes.
In his second term, Macron does not need to worry about reelection prospects, yet the country needs to worry about what comes after him. Although Macron’s term still runs until 2027, this pension reform may be his last significant domestic policy, as both his position in the assembly and his popularity on the streets will not give him much room for further legislation. For most of the French, Macron has now fully become the out-of-touch Jupiterian ruler they had always suspected him to be. It is likely that even if he attempts to unite the French people, as he initially set out to do, all efforts will be in vain.
In 2017, Macron eclipsed the traditional parties that had dominated the French political system, when he founded his En Marche movement and won the election. With the Socialists and Républicains left in tatters, Le Pen’s far-right National Rally and Mélanchon’s Corbynist France Unbowed have experienced a steady rise in popularity. Both in 2017 and 2022, Macron has been the only one able to defeat Le Pen and prevent the National Rally from ruling the country. With Macron as President, the Socialist centre-Left and Républicain centre-Right have not come up with anyone able to rival the far-Right or far-Left. Macron’s party is most likely to wither away as he departs from the Élysée. So: what, or who, is going to prevent the 2027 election turning into a battle of the extremes?
If the past few months of quarrel around the pension reform have shown anything, it is that neither Mélanchon’s nor Le Pen’s parties are fit to govern. Le Pen and her party never properly defended any position; yes, they opposed the reform on paper, but did not add anything to the debate. In what very much looks like an effort to bide time, they failed to provide a strong opposition and mostly stayed quiet as the country ripped itself apart. Conversely, Mélanchon’s France Unbowed behaved more like hooligans than like elected representatives of the people. Members of his party encouraged unlawful blockages of the country, undermining the rule of law in favour of insurrection. In the National Assembly, they preferred trading insults rather than ideas, before trying to stall all discussion and block the legislation by filing over 20,000 amendments to the reform.
If these past months only offer a window into the functioning of these two parties, the past decade has seen an erosion of the French political landscape which benefited both. Whilst Macron is not the only one to blame for that — the Socialists and the Républicains did not need much help to sink their respective parties — he did, by claiming to be the “absolute centrist”, destroy what remained of the centre-Left and the centre-Right. Similarly, his project to bring the French back together after the scandal-ridden years of Nicolas Sarkozy and weak leadership of François Hollande has failed. Instead, Macron has exacerbated tensions in a society that now barely holds together.
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