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.