Unrest in
France
Emmanuel
Macron Risks It All in Act II of His Presidency
In the
second half of his term, French President Emmanuel Macron has been pursuing
many of his political goals unilaterally. Whether it's pushing through
controversial pension reforms or meeting with unpopular autocrats, why is
Macron taking such risks?
By Britta
Sandberg
22.01.2020,
11:28 Uhr
The ceiling
above Emmanuel Macron is adorned with golden cherubs and behind him are the
French and European flags. In front of him are some 300 journalists, all
waiting in the ballroom of the Élysée Palace to listen to the French
president's new year's wishes. Macron speaks at length about the value of a
free press, yet he says nothing about his controversial pension reform or the
fact that traffic in Paris has been paralyzed for weeks. Nor does he mention
the major foreign policy issues France is facing as 2020 gets started. It is a
gray Wednesday afternoon in Paris and the 42nd consecutive day of strikes.
Macron looks a little tired.
Since the
beginning of December, the French government has been struggling to hash out a
solution to the pension dispute, with Prime Minister Edouard Philippe
negotiating around the clock with trade unions and employers' associations.
Some of the appointment logs the prime minister's office has been sending out
recently are so jam-packed they read like some kind of social-partner
speed-dating event.
The
negotiations are focused on the single largest and most important reform of
Macron's term: the simplification of France's pension system. His is not the
first government to take on this elephantine task, and others before him have
failed. Macron is due to present a first draft of the reforms to his ministers
on Jan. 24. Further negotiations will continue into spring.
If Macron
can successfully push his reforms through parliament before summer, he's sure
to win the respect of even the conservatives and his chances of a second term
would improve, even if his government has already made some concessions. If
Macron fails, though, it would represent a sensitive blow to his image as a
reformer.
Breaking
With Tradition
Macron has
been president of France for two years and eight months now, putting him just
slightly past the halfway mark of a five-year term of office. Some time ago, he
set in motion what he has called "Acte II," the second act of his
presidency. Macron has hunkered down in the Élysée, a palatial building that
many of the men who came before him often said feels like a bunker -- a place
that isolates its occupant from the rest of the world.
But unlike
his immediate predecessor, François Hollande, Macron has never seemed out of
place. On the contrary: He appears to feel right at home. Much like the
Socialist François Mitterrand, Macron appreciates symbols of power and grand
gestures as much as he likes violating the Élysée's anachronistic protocols.
According to palace employees, Macron tends to walk out and greet his guests in
the hallway rather than waiting for them in his office. In the palace's
basement, the president regularly boxes with one of his bodyguards -- in a room
that is normally reserved for security guards.
The Macrons
dusted off the salons of the Élysée and had the heavy wall tapestries, dark red
damask curtains and large-format oil paintings moved into storage, replacing
them with light-colored fabrics, modern furniture and contemporary art. The
bunker is much more inviting now. In a further attempt to preserve some shred
of normalcy, France's first couple is said to go out to eat at a restaurant at
least once a week.
But is it
possible to remain normal when palace guards shout, "Monsieur le Président
de la République!" every time Macron walks into a room? Or when angry
demonstrators have been carrying placards outside the palace for weeks that
read: "Let's bury the Macronie"?
Reforms Are
Coming
Many people
who know Emmanuel Macron say he has not really changed in the roughly two and a
half years that he has lived at the Élysée. He is still just as restless as he
was at the beginning of his term, they say, and is still wont to send text
messages to advisors at 3 a.m. As always, he is said to require astonishingly
little sleep.
Others are
critical of Macron for having become so sure of himself that his answers,
whether at press conferences or during discussions with citizens, have gotten
longer and longer. Too long, in fact.
Confidants
of the French president describe the mood inside the Élysée in these days of
unending strikes as nervous, though they say it's not nearly as tense as it was
a year ago at the height of the Yellow Vest crisis. Still, the general strike
currently gripping the country is already the longest spell of industrial
action in the history of the French railway operator SNCF. It's also the
longest-running social conflict since the unrest of 1968. The oft-cited
protests of 1995, which were also directed against a planned pension reform,
lasted only three weeks. The prime minister at the time, Alain Juppé,
ultimately withdrew his plans.
No one has
any intention of following in Juppé's footsteps today, even if the strike
continues. A reform of the pension system is on its way, the government says --
and with it, the abolition of a system that many experts describe as highly
unjust, one with special regulations for 42 professions and privileges for SNCF
and Metro conductors. A point system is to take its place that will apply to
everyone equally.
Since Prime
Minister Édouard Philippe offered to abandon the government's plan to raise the
retirement age to 64 last week, a compromise seems possible for the first time.
Still, the additional working years would have funneled 12 billion euros more
into the pension system by 2027, which, according to the government's
calculations, will now be missing. It's now up to the unions to find another
solution to finance the pension scheme by late April. Otherwise, the prime
minister has said, the government could push through its planned reforms per
decree. The unions' victory is, therefore, only a partial one.
The End of
an Era
But the
protests aren't just about pensions. They have a lot to do with mistrust and
anger toward a government that has already abolished the wealth tax and relaxed
protections for employees against dismissal. Protestors are also frustrated at
the perceived end of a societal model in which the state protects its citizens,
guarantees solidarity and provides civil servants with generous rewards,
including early retirement and a good pension.
"The
absurd thing about this labor dispute is that it is directed at the first
reform of Macron's that promises real social justice," says political
scientist Roland Cayrol. "It's just that, to this day, many people haven't
understood the reform. Which is a product of the government having done a
miserable job of explaining and selling it."
Cayrol is
one of those with whom Macron occasionally exchanges text messages. The
78-year-old has personally known every French president since Mitterrand and
has worked as an advisor to many of them. He warned Macron not to push through
changes without involving citizens in the process.
Nevertheless,
Cayrol considers the pension reform to be the right move and he is convinced
that the money problem can be solved. Why, for instance, shouldn't money be
taken from the well-stocked pension reserve fund, Cayrol wonders. "If this
succeeds, France would for the first time have a single pension system for the
private and public sectors, with only minor exceptions. Despite everything,
this would be remarkable," he says.
Macron is,
however, taking a significant risk in trying to push through this reform.
Already, the far-right populist Marine Le Pen and her Rassemblement National
party are profiting from the protests. But unlike the clashes with the Yellow
Vest movement, the president has this time delegated the crisis to his prime
minister. In December, at the height of the strike, Macron traveled to the
Ivory Coast for a state visit. Early last week, he joined five African heads of
state in creating a new coalition for the fight against terrorism in the Sahel.
He is, it would seem, eager to avoid the impression that this crisis is taking
up all of his attention.
But the
brunt of the blowback from the reform proposals still falls on Macron. It isn't
Philippe's name that appears on most of the protesters' signs, but Macron's. In
France, it's still the king who gets beheaded, not his adjutants.
Uniting an
Archipelago
France is
no longer a united, solidary republic, says Jérome Fourquet, but a fragmented
kingdom of islands, an archipelago of sorts. Fourquet works at IFOP, the oldest
polling agency in France. It's his job to measure the nation's sensitivities
with a sober eye. More than half of all French people still support the
protesters, Fourquet says, and two-thirds are dissatisfied with Macron.
Last year,
he published a best-selling book about his archipelago theory. Fourquet
attributes the division of the country into "many small and some large
islands" to the diminishing importance of Catholicism. In the past, it was
the Catholics versus the secularists -- just two camps, and everyone's
positions were clear. You were either religious or you weren't. You were on the
left or the right. Now, however, there's also a geographical fragmentation.
Elites, Fourquet says, tend to live in big cities, while those people who fear
change usually live in the countryside.
This
phenomenon can also be observed in other Western democracies. "But in a
republic where the Jacobian principle of social cohesion is ingrained in the
DNA, this development destabilizes us more than it does our neighbors,"
Fourquet says.
Macron
promised to unify the French prior to his election. "But how can he do
that when he's dealing with an archipelago?" Fourquet says, adding that
Macron's demeanor and style of government had also widened the gap between
those at the top and those at the bottom of society.
All of the
small, arrogant utterances that marked the early days of Macron's tenure as
president still hang over him to this day. Early on, he displayed a habit of
admonishing and rebuking citizens who tried to speak with him. And he made it
clear to everyone that he expected them to work more. Macron changed his manner
of speaking long ago, but his words have not been forgotten.
No Real
Dialogue
On a Friday
earlier this month, in a large room near Paris' Trocadero Square, the president
visited for the first time a citizens' meeting on climate policy that he
himself had initiated. A group of 150 randomly selected French people are in
attendance to develop proposals for a more effective climate policy. If
everything goes well, their work will ultimately result in draft legislation.
Long, white
tables have been set up for the evening. Macron sits at one of them with a
microphone in hand and, as usual, his cuffs sticking just a bit too far out of
his jacket. First, he thanks the attendees for their service. "In our
democracy, we don't involve citizens enough in the hunt for solutions," he
says, adding that the time for small-scale decision-making is over. This has to
do with the urgency of climate change, which he says requires the reaching of
mutual agreements.
He also
says he isn't here to talk for too long, but to have a conversation. Then comes
a sentence that contradicts everything that the French have come to expect from
their president: "On this evening, I'm a citizen like anybody else, like
you."
Of course,
a real dialogue never takes off. Those gathered read aloud polite, carefully
articulated questions, while the president explains, instructs and lectures.
The Foreign
Policy Expert
A sense of
urgency has been a leitmotif of Macron's presidency. His policies are guided by
the conviction that action must be taken before it's too late. This goes for
his approach to the climate, his reform program and his foreign policy agenda,
at the center of which he envisions a confident Europe capable of holding its
own against China and the U.S. in a new, bipolar world order.
European
foreign policy is an issue near and dear to the French president. Ever since he
had to relinquish his hope of strengthening Europe politically and militarily
hand-in-hand with the German chancellor, he has been charging ahead on his own.
He considers the challenges facing Europe to be too great to wait for the
approval of each individual EU member state.
"He
has a very dark vision of the world," says Sophie Pedder, a correspondent
with the Economist in Paris. "He sees China's economic and political rise
as an acute threat to the existing international order. On the other hand,
there is Europe: lonely, battered and unable to act. Macron believes the
current status quo poses a threat, while this status quo doesn't seem to worry
Angela Merkel."
In late
October, Pedder conducted an interview at the Élysée for the Economist. In it,
Macron laid out his apocalyptic view of the world, declared NATO to be
brain-dead and recommended a rapprochement with Russia. The interview was
published two weeks later. During that interval, the Élysée had the recording:
Macron's advisers knew full well what he had said.
Yet they
did nothing to water down or change the controversial NATO comment. Nobody
called the journalist. The provocation was no accident.
Going It
Alone
Macron is
not afraid to go it alone and does not shy away from forging new alliances to
strengthen his influence. He's a realist, not an ideologue. In October, he
received Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in Paris with full military
honors, a man whose authoritarian understanding of democracy Macron once
sharply criticised. They spoke for two hours.
Last
August, without first consulting any of his European allies, Macron invited
Vladimir Putin to his vacation home on the Cote d'Azur -- the very man who has
been working for years to drive a wedge between the Europeans. A G-7 summit
took place a few days later in Biarritz, France, a group from which Russia has
been excluded since it annexed Crimea in 2014. The French president wanted to
talk informally with Putin about various issues that would be raised at the
summit.
Macron
believes that Russia must be brought into the European fold before it turns
completely to China -- not least because Moscow has considerable influence in
both Syria and Iran. Not talking to Russia would be a big mistake, Macron said
during a conversation with journalists. In September, he sent his foreign and
defense ministers to Moscow.
"Macron
is stubborn. He really wants to change things," says Bruno Tertrais from
the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris. Tertrais considers Macron's
approach to Russia to be too simplistic. He was an advisor to Macron during the
2017 election campaign -- one of many, he says modestly.
As a
foreign policy expert, the president brings many talents with him, Tertrais
says. This includes not only a coherent analysis of the international
situation, which few heads of state are capable of, but also a gift for
building close personal relationships with other leaders. This is, Tertrais
continues, also how Macron has managed to keep open a channel of communication
to U.S. President Donald Trump.
Another one
of Macron's strengths, says Tertrais, is his energy and determination. "We
are dealing with a president who wants to shape things," he says.
And if no
one else is willing to help, Macron is happy to go it alone.
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