Macron learns his trade

The outpouring of hostility and hatred towards Emmanuel Macron since the start of the gilets jaunes protest movement, both in the demonstrations themselves and on social media, is unprecedented in the Fifth Republic. At the height of the protests, just before Christmas last year, cardboard puppets of the President were paraded through the streets before being symbolically guillotined. On the back of many yellow jackets were slogans calling for Macron’s immediate resignation and a lot worse. One demonstrator, with calculated crudeness, alluding to the fact that Brigitte Macron is over twenty years older than her husband, wrote on the back of his jacket, “Macron, screw your old woman - not the people” (“Macron, baise ta vieille – pas le peuple”). The mainstream media, whether for reasons of political correctness, embarrassment or  perhaps to avoid being accused of fanning the flames of violence, have not given great prominence to these and many other such expressions, but they have been both consistent and clearly visible for anyone who takes a careful look at the TV pictures, watches the YouTube videos and listens to the slogans shouted in chorus by demonstrators.

The rise of social media with the possibility they offer anyone and everyone to make comments or proffer insults and even death threats from behind a wall of convenient and irresponsible anonymity is of course part of the explanation. Macron is not the only politician to have been targeted. Insults have also been hurled at ministers and MPs from his party, not to speak of inflammatory comments about Jews, homosexuals and anyone else who is seen as “different”.  On many occasions, the verbal violence has overflowed into tags, smashing, looting and physical violence against people and property. At the same time, there has been a fresh and nasty outbreak of antisemitism in both word and deed.

Macron himself though has been the target of the largest number of these verbal attacks from the gilets jaunes and those who hide behind them.  As one would expect, the reasons are multiple and have to do with his own personality, what he is seen to represent in the eyes of many demonstrators and the parts of public opinion that sympathise with their cause, as well as wider reasons touching on the nature of populism.

Starting with Macron's own personality, right from the moment he burst on to the political scene, he has sought to style himself as a man with both a vision and a mission, acting with determination to introduce the reforms that France has shirked for many years.  When he was still only a candidate for the presidency, in October 2016, he said in a newspaper interview that France needed a “Jupiterian” presidency. The moniker has stuck and is used sarcastically against him by his opponents and some media, to characterise his perceived aloofness, handing down judgements from on high and brooking no contradiction.  There can be no doubt about the clarity of his vision or his single-mindedness in pursuing it. But there lies the rub. However clear his vision and objectively justified his policies, his pronouncements often appear, and are presented as such in some media outlets, as tactless and unfeeling. The example of his recent advice to a young man in a crowd is a case in point. Complaining to the President that he had a qualification in horticulture but was unable to find a job, Macron told him in a tone of voice that almost amounted to a scolding that, “I just need to cross the street and I’ll find you one”. Objectively, he is not entirely off the mark. Any young person in full possession of their physical and mental faculties and who really wants a job should have no problem finding one. There are indeed many on offer, even if they are not always gratifying and well paid. And it is also true that too many young people tend to feel entitled, once they have obtained a qualification, to immediately get a job where they can put it to use. Even if  Macron was only intending to make the simple point that the state cannot guarantee that every graduate of every school can find a job in his or her chosen speciality, the message delivered, it must be said with a surprising lack of empathy, created an impression in public opinion that he didn’t really care about the personal circumstances of the young man, simply that there are plenty of jobs around and that, all other things being equal, people looking for work should stop complaining, fill them and stop drawing social benefits.

As a result of this and other spontaneous comments on other occasions, many people have been quick to conclude that the elite in general and Macron in particular, as its most willing and visible expression, are simply interested in numbers, facts and statistics and not in people. Even if Macron, as he explained to an audience recently, comes from no higher in the social scale than an upper middle-class family from the French provinces and has acquired the qualifications and position he holds today by dint of his intelligence and hard work, it nevertheless remains true that many graduates of France’s elite schools have an analytical mindset drilled into them during their training and tend to see any problem as susceptible to rational analysis and solution, without necessarily taking account of the many and varied human factors. French people in general do not like this attitude at the best of times and the gilets jaunes protests have shown that many are more than willing to say so. I don’t think I am alone in feeling that the city of Bordeaux, that has sustained frequent damage during the regular Saturday protests since last November, has been targeted precisely because its long-time mayor, former minister of foreign affairs and Prime Minister, Alain Juppé, upright and principled though he undoubtedly is, but whose family and educational background is almost identical to that of Macron, is nevertheless tarred with the same brush by the gilets jaunes and their hangers-on as another typical example of the “uncaring” elite.

And then there is the populist element too. I was struck by a perceptive article by the journalist who writes the “Bagehot” column in “The Economist”. Last week (March 9^th) his article was entitled “Suspicious minds” and focused on the populist predilection for conspiracy theories. To quote one passage: “Since “the people” have numbers on their side, their failure to get everything they want can be explained only by the cunning of the elites, who fix everything behind the scenes, or the machinations of traitors who claim to be on the side of the people but sell out at the last moment”.   Although the article was ostensibly about the U.K on the possible eve of Brexit, these lines encapsulate an attitude widespread among the gilets jaunes and can also explain their adamant refusal to let any one of their number make an attempt to lead them.

Once the surprise and shock of the first violent protests passed, Macron seized the initiative in an attempt to show that he was not impervious to the reasons for them. As I wrote in my last post, the government has introduced a series of measures, which, at a cost of nearly €11 billion and climbing, were designed first and foremost to put more money in peoples’ pockets, particularly those of the low paid from which the gilets jaunes draw most of their support. In his New Year’s address however, he cautioned that “nothing can be built on lies” (“on ne bâtit rien sur des mensonges”) and expressed the wish that truth would prevail (“je fais …un voeu de vérité”).

It is surely significant that nearly all the measures that have been taken or initiated in response to the protest movement have been focused, true to Macron’s oft-repeated commitment, on jobs and employment, as they are nearly all targeted towards people in work. This is obviously true of the earnings-related cash benefit and tax-free overtime, but even the subsidy for trading in an old diesel car for a newer one reaches its maximum level for people who drive more than 60km. a day to get to work and back. To make the point even clearer, his government has also leaned on companies to pay a special New Year bonus to their employees and on the motorway companies to grant big discounts to drivers who use toll motorways every day. The full effect on take-home pay of all these measures will not be felt for some months at least, but their intended impact is unmistakable: to make work pay more. Even if Macron has had to tactically retreat from his European pledge for a lower budget deficit in 2019, the strategic effect of these moves, together with the previously enacted measures to favour apprenticeships and improve the vocational training system will surely show up gradually in lower levels of unemployment.

But the other major development over the past few weeks has been the launch of “The Great National Debate” in which Macron has quite deliberately become personally involved. The idea is to gather from people all over France their concerns for the present and hopes for the future, a remake, over two centuries later, of the Cahiers des Doléances put before the States General in 1789. The gilets jaunes initially dismissed the initiative has “mere bla bla” and public opinion in general was sceptical. But it should never be forgotten that the French love expressing their views and especially their grievances, real or imagined. The great debate has been a great success in this respect. Town halls all over the country have organised well-attended meetings and made registers available for people to write down their grievances and suggestions or paste in their contributions written at home.  The government has launched a dedicated website on which anybody can give short answers to a series of questions on taxation, public services, environmental policy and the trappings of democracy.  And it must be said that Macron, when he has organized and attended larger versions of these town hall meetings himself, has been remarkable in his performances, sometimes spending up to 7 hours in a meeting, listening, noting down and answering questions from rural and urban mayors, young people and pensioners. His mastery of arcane details and willingness to face awkward questions has never been in doubt but faced with real people talking about real bread and butter issues, covered by TV stations broadcasting live, his tone has also softened. What will come of the great debate, how its conclusions will be drawn, what solutions the government will propose and whether public opinion will find them acceptable remains to be seen, but the impact has been considerable and has already, we are told, raised Macron’s poll ratings. The debate is officially due to end on March 15 but will probably go on for longer and Macron has already scheduled visits to parts of the country he has not yet been to.

There are at least two conclusions that I draw from all this. The first is that Emmanuel Macron for all his intelligence, hard work and single-mindedness, has not yet acquired the all-round political maturity that French people expect from their leaders. He has never been a constituency MP, nor the mayor of a city, town or village, the typical background from which almost all national politicians, even graduates of ENA, have emerged in the past. He has never talked on a regular basis to small farmers and shopkeepers, never written a letter to a housing authority on behalf of a constituent, never accompanied standard-bearing grey-haired veterans to pay tribute to their fallen comrades in a quiet village graveyard.  All these almost unobtrusive and unpublicized acts that anchor a politician in a local and regional context and win respect and support weigh heavily in the French collective consciousness. The fact that Macron has never had such experience is surely one of the reasons why many French people have come to find him aloof, haughty and out of touch with the problems of ordinary people. If this reading is correct, the gilets jaunes protest movement is a price he has had to pay for these shortcomings. He is now, belatedly, trying to do something about it, while not losing sight of his overall strategy.

When the French are asked which of their recent Presidents they hold in most affection, they invariably choose Jacques Chirac. They have clearly forgiven his frequent swings from one political platform to another and remember most of all his ability to connect with ordinary people, deriving from his outgoing personality and the deep roots he struck in a rural constituency in the heart of France. Chirac liked nothing more than sharing a joke with farmers while admiring their pigs or cows and swilling pints of beer. Many years of such everyday political activity earned him affection and admiration.  If only he had devoted as much energy to reforming France in his twelve years in power, what a great President he could have been!

Secondly therefore, in order to push through the reforms in which he believes so strongly - and that France so sorely needs - Emmanuel Macron must by now have realised that he needs to win the support and even the affection of public opinion. His recent change of tack is a good start, but the battle is far from over. Even if he is capable of learning fast, the task of becoming a mature, all-round politician will take many months and even years.

Yellow power

The “yellow jackets” (gilets jaunes) have now been demonstrating for fourteen successive Saturdays since November 17 of last year. Over that period, it is clear that the movement has evolved but it is still difficult to pin down exactly what it stands for and what it is ultimately demanding. Presumably, it is only if those demands are met that the protests will peter out, even if the “mobilisation” as the demonstrators put it, has fallen from week to week and even if public opinion, initially very sympathetic to the movement, now seems to have cooled. No uncontested leader capable of formulating such demands has emerged and not much is achieved by asking the demonstrators themselves. Last Saturday, a journalist asked precisely that question: how long would the movement go on?  The answer was, as it has been since the beginning: “as long as it takes” or “we won’t back down” (on ne lâche rien!).

Back down on what?

To dispel one myth straightaway, even if the demonstrators and the shadowy leaders who continue to call for demonstrations every Saturday on Facebook or Twitter, claim that the movement is apolitical and refuse any label other than a yellow one, the movement is intensely political! Its main demands at the outset were for higher living standards, lower taxes and greater “fairness” in taxation, including the restoration of the wealth tax “for the rich”, that Macron abolished at the beginning of his presidency.  Precisely the kinds of political demands that are normally reflected in the programmes of political parties. Another demand however, that still seems to be uppermost in demonstrators’ minds, is the immediate resignation of Emmanuel Macron.

How justified are these demands and are they realistic?

The government’s initial response, although many would say that it came too late, was the abolition of the rises in fuel taxes that had sparked the first protests, followed by a reduction in taxes for those on low pensions and the announcement of a big subsidy for the trading in of old diesel cars for newer ones, the highest subsidy being reserved for low-income families driving more than 60 km. a day and buying a new or even second-hand electric vehicle. In addition, the negative income tax system, in effect an earnings-related cash benefit for the low paid, was extended to employees earning one and a half times the minimum wage. The government also announced that payments for overtime, including in the public sector, will once again be exempt from income and payroll taxes. The response to these measures has been massive. The demand for more environmentally friendly vehicles has far outstripped official expectations and there has been a considerable increase in applications for the earnings-related benefit, to the extent that the administration for family allowances that processes them has had to take on extra staff to be able to cope. The initial cost of these measures is put at about 11 billion Euros, more than three times the amount of revenue produced by the hated wealth tax. The final cost will probably be even higher, once all the new vehicles have been purchased, the subsidies paid out and all the successful applicants for the earnings-related benefit are receiving it on a regular basis. The amount of tax revenue foregone because of the non-taxation of overtime is also unknown at this stage.

At first blush then, at the cost of a larger budget deficit and more public borrowing, the demand for higher living standards has been met, even if many have not seen the impact as yet on their monthly earnings or benefits. Why then has the movement not stopped? Going back to the last big social upheaval in 1995, it was caused by the government plans to put an end to the perceived and costly pension privileges of public sector employees, particularly public transport workers. When they brought the country to a standstill for over a month, Alain Juppé’s government dropped the reform plans and things returned to normal.  The big difference between then and now is that the public sector unions called that strike, managed talks with the government and called it off after winning the day. This time, the protests have been more spontaneous and focused not only on a rejection of a specific government policy but on a more diffuse feeling of malaise. In addition, they have taken place outside the traditional political parties and trade unions, who, whenever they have tried to jump on the bandwagon, have been firmly rebuffed.

The fact that the movement has continued long after these concessions have been made and that thousands of demonstrators are still turning out, even if their number are dwindling, in towns and cities all over France every Saturday, suggests that other factors are also at play.

The first possible answer is that the government is not yet seen to have done enough to improve living standards. Objectively, this is surely debatable, but the perception of unfairness is strong. Clearly there are people who find it hard to make ends meet at the end of each month. Reports suggest that although France’s all-encompassing tax and benefits system does more than in any other EU country to reduce income inequality, over and above the provision of universal health care and education, cash benefits do not always flow to those most in need of them – particularly, reports suggest, people living alone and single parent families,  whose numbers are said to have increased substantially in the past few years. If this is indeed the case, some tweaks to a system of benefits that has seen many others in the past should be enough to solve the problem. The government has indeed shown that it is aware of these problem by extending the biggest increase in the earnings-related benefit precisely to single-parent families.

Another explanation is the relative geographical isolation of many of the first demonstrators, the ones who filtered and sometimes blocked traffic on roundabouts in rural and above all semi-rural areas of France. It is true that many such areas, described by the somewhat catchall phrase of “La France Périphérique”, often depend on one economic activity or even one large factory. If that factory closes because it has become uncompetitive in a European market of 500 million consumers, people are either out of work or forced to seek work further away, meaning longer journey times, usually by car. Often enough, it also means the closure of essential public services like the post office, public transport, the local clinic or school.  The inexorable rise of large metropolitan areas around Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux or Toulouse to the detriment of smaller towns or semi-rural areas has created a lot of “left-behind communities” as they were recently characterized by “The Economist”, with fewer job prospects, fewer public services, poor internet access and facing a very uncertain future for themselves and their children.  This phenomenon is not of course peculiar to France and, as many commentators have pointed out, can account for the rise of populist parties in many other European countries, let along the United Sates. But within Europe, France is a country with a vast land mass from which small farmers and small industries have been gradually disappearing, leaving large tracts of the country overpopulated and underused. Peoples’ feeling of despair for themselves and future generations seems to me to be a major key to the gilet jaunes movement. The rise in fuel taxes introduced by the government to reduce carbon emissions was, in this reading, the last straw for many people who have come to feel for some years now that they and their towns or villages are ignored by decision-makers “in Paris”, who have forgotten or abandoned them by gradually depriving them of public services, while still requiring them to pay the same high taxes as everyone else. Political parties like Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National or Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise have largely capitalised in the past on the anger and resentment born of this predicament.  But even they do not seem to have benefitted politically from the gilets jaunes movement, if opinion polls are to be believed. As if their policies, consisting basically of closing borders, keeping immigrants out and generally turning the clock back to a mythical golden age have failed to convince even those to whom they would appear to be the most attractive.

And then there is the explanation focusing on the political dynamics of insurrection and revolution in a country with a such a rich legacy of revolutionary upheavals. Political though it is, the gilet jaunes movement has actively resisted all attempts to structure itself and bring recognised leaders to the fore who could be spokespersons for their demands and engage ministers and senior officials. Indeed, any putative leader who has put his or her head above the parapet has been shouted down, insulted and sometimes physically threatened or assaulted. The first example that comes to mind is that of a single mother with a lowly job as a nursing auxiliary, Ingrid Levavasseur, who set out to establish a gilet jaunes list for the European elections in May. The campaign from within the movement against the very idea of engaging in conventional politics and against her personally was so intense that she soon decided give up. All this suggests to me at least that strings are being pulled in the background to ensure that the movement does not evolve into anything resembling a political party but, on the contrary, keeps its insurrectional and revolutionary characteristics. Those pulling the strings are probably activists from the radical left or the radical right, many of whom are known anti-establishment and anti-capitalist figures and it is they who are largely responsible for triggering the insurrectional violence that has regularly attended the Saturday demonstrations in cities like Paris, Toulouse and Bordeaux.

In his seminal work “A History of Modern France”, published in 1964, the British Professor of French history, Alfred Cobban, writes the following in the chapter entitled the “The Decade of Revolution”:

“..mobs require leaders and to provide this intermediate leadership, an underworld of political agitators and journalists grew up which was capable of being used, when the revolutionaries themselves split, by one faction against another, and in the end, of becoming a power in itself.”

Replace the “journalists” that Cobban refers to by the shadowy figures active on social media, and the mob of 1789 as he describes it, is somewhat reminiscent of the gilets jaunes of 2019. Of course, the society and political infrastructure of the Fifth Republic are nothing like that of pre-revolutionary France, so it is more likely that the demands of the gilets jaunes will eventually and successfully be taken up by existing political parties or that the movement, shorn if its more radical elements, will evolve into a proper political party of its own with an undisputed leader. After all, in just two years, Emmanuel Macron himself created an entirely new political movement that drew in figures from the existing centre-left and centre-right political parties, that won him the presidency and a large majority in the Assemblée Nationale. But there must also be a chance, to paraphrase Cobban, that the gilet jaunes will develop into a revolutionary-like power in itself.

This revolutionary aspect could not be more clearly illustrated than by frequently reiterated demands for the immediate resignation of Emmanuel Macron. One of the least comprehensible aspect of the movement is the angry hostility and even downright hate that has been directed to the person of the President, elected not even two years ago on a platform to get France growing again and bring down the unacceptably high level of unemployment, particularly among the young, surely one of the major causes of social inequality.

What has happened? Where has the President gone wrong? How has he reacted and, short of resigning, which is clearly not on the cards, will his reaction start to solve the issues that triggered the upsurge of protest back in November? I shall try and answer these questions in another post.