It’s been a great few months for the rats of Paris. As they’ve grown fat, feasting on rubbish in the streets, citizens have been struggling to catch a train and facing fuel shortages at the pumps. Tomorrow, another rolling strike of refuse collectors will start and the streets of the capital will again fill with the pungent aroma of social conflict.
President Emmanuel Macron, meanwhile, is missing in action, hiding in the Élysée Palace or travelling abroad. A recent front page of the left-leaning Libération newspaper declared that he was becoming increasingly out of touch with the people.
If anything, the accusation is too kind. Macron has been playing a dangerous game with French democracy, particularly since his use of article 49.3 of the constitution to pass a pension reform without parliamentary support. These reforms, which will raise the age at which people can claim state pension from 62 to 64, remain highly unpopular, while the various social and trade union-led movements to oppose them command high levels of support.
The most recent polls show that 68% of the public remain opposed to the reforms and 67% support the movement contesting them, while a further 11% are nonplussed. This week, France’s constitutional council is expected to rule on whether the reform is struck down or not.
So who is Macron doing this for?
He insists it is in the general interest, that with an ageing population the system has become unsustainable and that it must be done now because the longer France waits, the more the system will degrade. Opponents argue that tax cuts he made in 2021, if reversed, could pay for the current pension shortfall. What’s clear is that, electorally, his actions are pleasing only a minority, what French economists Bruno Amable and Stefano Palombarini call the “bourgeois bloc”: the affluent middle to upper class, roughly the 27% of the electorate that voted for Macron in the first round of the 2022 presidential elections.
While life on the inside of the bourgeois bloc might be pleasant enough to consider two more years’ work to be no big deal, the outlook for others is not so rosy. Take Laura, who works as a signaller on France’s train network, (though she is currently on strike with her union, Sud Rail). I spoke to Laura on the phone after she had finished a day’s picketing. She told me how she often works weekends and bank holidays, at night, or early in the morning, with her schedule changing constantly. Many of her colleagues are “broken by the job, well before the age of 64”, she said.
In her view, this is about more than pension reform, with many people in the wider social movement pushed to protest by their experiences of inflation or precarious work – and the sense that this reform could be the thin end of the wedge. The stakes are high: it’s fair to say the president’s actions are weakening the public’s already shaky trust in French democracy.
It’s not just article 49.3. Police violence has been an astonishing theme of French politics in recent years. During the “yellow vest” protests, one woman was killed by police and hundreds were injured, including dozens losing eyes or hands. Recent protests over reservoirs in Sainte-Soline, near Poitiers, left two protesters in a coma after police allegedly deployed military-grade weaponry, using more than 5,000 teargas canisters in two hours. Two men at pension reform protests have lost testicles, a woman has lost a thumb and a 19-year-old I recently interviewed believes he was deliberately run over by police who chased him on motorbikes. (The police dispute this account.) Violence has been used against trade unionists, protesters, reporters and even politicians, like the France Insoumise MP Antoine Léaument who was hit by a teargas canister while watching protests from across the road.
Then there’s the rhetoric: Macron’s interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, has embraced a Trumpian register, declaring war on “far-left intellectual terrorism” and threatening to cut subsidies to the Human Rights League NGO for its criticism of police violence.
Watching all this with delight is the far right. The left does stand to make some electoral gains from the crisis, especially as the leaders are unions supported by leftist parliamentarians. But it is the likes of the Rassemblement National that are best poised to take advantage. Marine Le Pen has successfully “de-demonised” her party over recent years, and made her personal brand of cat-loving nationalism appear softer to voters (in part because her rhetoric has spread across the spectrum). However, the dangerous implications of a far-right victory remain clear. Her plan, had she won in 2022, included a proposal that could have given her an instant parliamentary supermajority. Voting preference polling this far from an election is of limited use, but a spate of recent polls suggest that Le Pen has seen a boost from all this chaos.
Both of Macron’s election victories were met with cheers from liberals. He was supposed to be the bulwark against the far right but, if events continue along this path, he may well end up helping it to power.
• Oliver Haynes is a freelance journalist and was highly commended in the Guardian Foundation’s Hugo Young award for political opinion writing 2021
