French protest and Macron’s isolation

By Joko Dansofo

A month-long protest by high school pupils over crumbling and crowded classrooms converged with broader frustrations over soaring living costs, rapidly widening inequality and falling public spending, brought together students, teachers, trade unionists and a resurrected gilets jaunes movement (yellow vests).

The gilet jaunes movement is a decentralized grassroots protest movement that originally emerged in France in November 2018 and ended in June 2020 in response to a planned government hike on diesel and petrol fuel taxes introduced by President Emmanuel Macron which his government framed as an environmental transition measure.

The protesters at the time adopted the highly visibility yellow vests which French motorists are legally required to keep in their vehicles as their uniform and symbol of the working and rural classes. The movement then quickly expanded beyond fuel prices into a wider anti-establishment revolt against high living costs, low wages, repression, taxation, and the perceived elitism of Macron (who critics dubbed the president of the rich after he repealed portions of France’s wealth tax).

This time those largely peaceful school- pupils protests were swiftly hijacked by masked groups who torched vehicles, ransacked businesses and severely damaged public infrastructure, including setting fire to Limoges’ city hall and invading that of Marseille.

Speaking from his office at Elysee Palace, the French president delivered an eight- minute speech expressing ‘’anger and shame’’ after the town hall was set ablaze, 2,000-plus shops looted, 2,300 people arrested and 1,000 police injured.

Macron acknowledged the ’deep anxiety’ of young people but offered no concrete policy initiatives, no cabinet reshuffle and no new public spending, merely telling his prime minister to organize consultations and asking opposition politicians to take a stand. The near universal chorus of condemnation that greeted Macron’s address to the nation after one of the most violent days of rioting and looting in France’s history, was a stark reflection of just how weakened he now is.

The Greens’ leader, Marine Tondelier, said that rather than ‘’even beginning to make any kind of mea culpa’’ (apologizing for wrong-doing), Macron was summoning us to the PM’s officelike pupils to the blackboard.’’

On the far right, the National Rally’s Jordan Bardella called the speech ‘’lamentable’’ and said Macron had ‘’nothing left to say’’ to the French. The party’s figurehead, Marine Le Pen, said the country was ‘’caught in a vice between violence and impotence.’’

The center-right’s Bruno Retailleau said Macron was ‘’totally overwhelmed,’’ while the radical left, Jean=Luc Melenchon accused the president of reying on ‘’inaction and police brutality’’ in doomed hopes that the protests would simply fizzle out.

Perhaps most damagingly, Macron’s former prime minister Edouard Philippe said he would have preferred ‘’decisions and initiatives that might lead to a return to order and the restoration of state authority…Our country needs to be governed.’’

Criticism is expected from rivals positioning themselves six months before a presidential election to choose Macron’s successor, but its sheer ferocity underlines his isolation, the disdain in which he is held, and the anger he inspires.

In decades gone by, French presidents facing mass protests on the streets could in effect buy a degree of social tranquility with targeted spending packages or public sector concessions. But France’s national debt, at 119% of GDP, is at its highest level since 1946. Its budget deficit, at 5.1%, is also among the highest in the European Union. There is just no money in the bank to ease the cost-of-living squeeze that brought 550,000 people on to the streets recently.

The markets are worried: France’s borrowing costs are higher than Greece’s. And with few fiscal options, the government’s clearest response – in time -honored French tradition – has been teargas and baton charges, sometimes against school children, further aggravating tensions.

The consequences for the presidential election could be profound. The centrist coalition built around Macron’s brand has all but collapsed. If the protests and violence persist, the main beneficiary will be the law-and- order champions of the right.

Jean-Baptiste Moreau, an influential former MP from Macron’s party with whom the largely lame-duck president still occasionally speaks, reportedly went as far as to suggest that the president should resign and call early presidential elections.

’Macron still thinks he can change things,’ he told Le Monde. ’But at the moment, Marine Le Pen is on the path to the Elysee Palace.’ Macron came to power as a ‘’Jupiterian’’ president. He used the term to describe his top-down, aloof, and vertically centralized leadership style. It was his deliberate strategy aimed at elevating the head of state above daily politics, projecting distant authority and technocratic brilliance.

But over nine years in the Elysee, that high-handed style, partly born, his critics say, of Macron’s lack of basic political experience as an elected official in a town hall or as a constituency MP, has morphed into perceived arrogance and detachment.

It has been compounded by catastrophic strategic errors, France’s spiraling economic problems. Macron lost a functional parliamentary majority by refusing to meaningfully campaign between the presidential and legislative elections of 2022.

Two years later he dissolved the National Assembly. That gamble backfired spectacularly, with voters returning an even more deadlocked parliament split between a divided left, a much -diminished centrist bloc and Le Pen’s far right.

Without a working majority, the government repeatedly resorted to controversial constitutional maneuvering to force through laws without a parliamentary vote, laying it and Macron open to further accusations of democratic illegitimacy. Compounding that institutional deadlock is the current fiscal crisis and subsequent student protests.

Joko Dansofo writes from Lokoja.