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.