As French President Macron started the process to pass a reform aiming at bringing retirement age from the current 62 to 64 years old, France dove into an outbreak of protests and mass demonstrations marking January and February with five general strikes and an uncountable amount of transport blockages by unions.
The reform, aimed at making France economically credible in the eyes of major European partners like Germany, comes in a country where the State has historically had a strong economic leadership and where liberalism has never really found a place. Macron’s bid to change the retirement system by reducing its costs clashes with the power of trade unions, which have shown themselves able to stymie the entire country multiple times.
Unions have been able to do what their foreign colleagues haven’t: create an intergenerational alliance. As other European countries, like Italy, saw the retirement age heightened by governments close to the EU leadership, the unions played the role of saviors of the youth, claiming that the cost of the pensions would have been a burden for the generations to come. In France that’s not the case, high schools, universities, honors colleges: students of any age have joined the demonstrations in Paris’ boulevards. It even happens, like last February 16th in Palaiseau, a small town in the southern hinterland of the capital, that the most widely seen posters are those of the local high school rather than the union one.
Such a massive movement against Macron has also made possible the lack of a right-wing grip on the demonstrations, pretty much the contrary of what happened in Italy with Matteo Salvini and GiorgiaMeloni.
Marine Le Pen, France’s hard-right leader, proposed a popular referendum on the issue, but struggled to carry a structured opposition in the Parliament, where the left-wing MPs of the NUPES alliance have played the biggest role in filibustering and opposing the bill.
The biggest demonstration is due to come on March 6th. It will gather hundreds of thousands of people, but Macron doesn’t seem to tremble. He’s used to ruling without popular support, favored by a majority electoral system that has always put the French face to the choice between him and Le Pen.
This reform is for Macron an occasion to showcase strength to his allies in Europe, mostly Germans, as he wants to take the EU leadership, a pretty impossible challenge without having strong liberal credentials. What he’s doing is a trade-off, the partial dismantling of the French welfare-state, already experimented before on unemployment insurance, for leading the continent. It’s a mixture of old-style French grandeur and post-liberalism: a formula that is causing the total delegitimization of the Macron presidency among his very own people, as his disapproval rate according to Politico goes beyond 60%.
Destroying the solidarity between the people and the institutions is not a good start for a likely European leadership. A rotten France in such an intertwined political landscape as Europe would cause an incredible instability. That’s a truth that should probably drive Macron in order not to take France on the brink of another “revolutionary” season.
