Provocation, contempt, lies and gifting respectability to the far-right. That was the distinctive cocktail employed by the French government in the run-up to yesterday's huge day of protest against the current pension reforms. President Emmanuel Macron, his labour minister Olivier Dussopt and government spokesperson Olivier Véran have all come up with declarations likely to anger those who understand that their reform bill is unnecessary, regressive and unjust.
These galling comments, vague and devoid of meaning, represent the apotheosis - thus far - of what has been catastrophic management of the reform from a democratic point of view. To ensure it passes more easily, Parliament's work has in effect been muzzled by the highly-debatable use of Article 47-1 of the French Constitution. And the executive has constantly refused to give any legitimacy to the demonstrating crowds and the trades unions, whose protests have confirmed the finding of opinion polls that the French public massively rejects these reforms.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
How can one understand such obstinate violence on the government's part? What lies behind the indifference it has shown to the consequences of such events? In our view there are two key issues at play.
Firstly, there are the economic reasons linked to the huge contradictions that have developed within contemporary capitalism, which has belatedly plunged into a neo-liberal phase. Then there are the political reasons, which are linked to the relationship between 'Macronism' and power, and to the sense of 'electoral immunity' that the presidency and its supporters feel. All of this combines to highlight and accelerate a dangerous regime crisis, a French variation on the difficulties that affect all Western democracies.
Scant legitimacy
By “regime crisis” we are not suggesting that the very survival of the Fifth Republic is at risk in the short term. Rather, its ruling elites are facing a growing crisis of legitimacy, which is spreading, taking hold, growing deeper and bursting out over the entire institutional framework. It is resulting in a radical separation – “in body and mind” one could say – between civic society and its political classes. This has had the harmful effect of fuelling the government's temptation to become more authoritarian and of holding back the country's collective preparedness to meet the challenges of our age.
The reform of the pension system is closely linked to this negative spiral and its causes, first and foremost because it has been imposed from on high. The head of state's powers in France's Fifth Republic are excessive, and the practices of successive governments have only strengthened the primal status of the presidency. The pre-eminent role of the president, something that has been criticised since the Fifth Republic was created in 1958, has become more and more out of kilter with a society in which the demand for democracy has grown, a society in which there are calls for people to have their voices heard and for them be able to participate.
Emmanuel Macron has paid little heed to this growing gap and has repeated ad nauseam that he has legitimacy from the ballot box and that this is enough to make the reforms acceptable. This is of course to forget that in 2022, as in 2017, voting for him was the only available choice to stop the far-right from winning, after a lifeless election campaign in which he avoided debate. It also forgets that in the legislative elections in June last year the ruling party lost its absolute majority at the National Assembly.
Even if Emmanuel Macron had won the presidential election hands down in a less distorted contest, a loftier conception of democracy regards it as a continual exercise, not simply reducing elections to a 'blank cheque' for whoever wins. But yet again we see how the president remains immersed in a 'decisionist' and monopolistic culture of power, an approach which has flourished throughout the Fifth Republic and which he never had the slightest intention of ending.
Overlapping with this old-fashioned institutional approach to government – one which had already been very apparent during the Covid pandemic – is another factor that has driven the divorce between our national representatives and the people, and one which is perfectly illustrated by the pension reform episode. This factor is the shift towards neo-liberalism in the country's social and economic model over the last four decades. Privatisation, commercialisation, and competition have obscured the common picture, fuelled growing inequality and made people's lives more precarious.
The resistance to this unrelenting march has been regular and huge, but has always been bypassed by the major parties of government, which in the past were represented by socialists and the inheritors of Gaullism. The fact that these parties became worn-out messes, wiped out in just five short years, is testament to the crisis of which we are speaking.
One particular episode from the Parliamentary pension reform debates speaks volumes about the changes that have occurred in such a short space of time. This was when the former socialist Olivier Dussopt, now President Macron's labour minister, found himself being asked the same question that he had himself addressed to the then rightwing minister Éric Woerth in 2010, when he had railed back then against plans to increase the retirement age to 62. Thirteen years later the two men are now members of the same ruling majority, a kind of French-style great coalition, seeking to increase the retirement age to 64.
If the pension reform episode illustrates so neatly how the Fifth Republic has run out of steam, it is because it also highlights the existence of a government with a neo-liberal bent, bringing together both initial supporters of the political entrepreneur Macron and opportunistic additions. It is a government that has been forced to use all the top-down powers that the presidential regime offers in order to impose its radical agenda on a society that doesn't want it.
Why is the government acting so harshly?
In summary, the 2023 pension reforms represent the quintessence of everything in the current regime that goes against the spirit of democracy and social justice. That being said, one has to admit that a threshold has now been crossed, one which needs explaining. In the past, the fear of social upheaval or being punished at the ballot box operated as a check. But such concerns seem to have vanished with this government.
While neo-liberal policies have indeed been imposed on France over many years, in the past public opinion was taken into account. In 1986 plans to reform the special pension regimes of certain workers were abandoned after a major strike by staff at rail company SNCF. In 1994, faced with student protests, the then prime minister Édouard Balladur scrapped plans for a separate – and lower - minimum wage for the young. Social protests also prevailed against plans for pension reform proposed by prime minister Alain Juppé in 1995 and saw flexible workplace contracts that had been implemented under prime minister Dominique de Villepin in 2006 quickly withdrawn.
Governments then had to look to other methods, those less likely to be derailed by mass protests, such as privatisation, liberalising finance, reducing employer contributions for social payments and reform of the health insurance system. Some administrations even chose to 'compensate' for the neo-liberal direction of their policies by bringing in measures such as income support, keeping a relatively high unemployment benefit payment and a reduction in working hours.
Such strategies are in any case in sharp contrast with the intransigence and direct confrontation that the government is showing today. Emmanuel Macron had certainly warned us about it. In his policy book Révolution (published by XO in 2016) he portrayed himself as the antithesis of the French way, a method which he said had stopped the country from “adapting to the world market”. If he was able to move on so easily from words to acts, that is for three major reasons.
Supporting threatened profitability
The first reason is economic, and flows from the fact that the crisis in capitalism has deepened post-2020. A continual reduction in productivity gains and the dependence of the private sector on permanent support from the public authorities are two of the main features of this crisis.
This has led to capital and its allies having two main requirements: on the one hand, keeping pressure on the workforce in order to ensure unproductive work was still profitable for companies; and on the other, reducing the welfare state in order to transfer resources to the private sector.
In other words, it was about disciplining workers in order to get them to accept degrading and poorly-paid work, and reducing social expenditure to finance reductions in taxes and fund grants to companies. For the economic elites, these were the necessary conditions for them to be able to pursue increased profits and amass capital.
And the pension reforms proposed under prime minister Élisabeth Borne respond precisely to these two conditions, even if that cannot be stated for political reasons. The reform will put additional pressure on reform to the unemployment benefit system, affecting the whole of the world of work. At the same time it will free up resources to fund the additional tax reductions that have been promised to employers.
That is why, in the space of three years, this government switched from its initial pension reform approach to backing a reform that adjusts the retirement age, an approach which is more effective than others at producing the desired effect. This is despite the fact that in the past even President Macron dismissed this form of pension reform as “hypocrisy”.
Protecting the doctrinal core of 'Macronism'
The second reason is ideological. Under the current circumstances, a government devoted to the interests of private capital can only toughen its stance, even more so given that the issue touches on the very core of this government's identity. Since his arrival at the Élysée in 2017, and even before, Emmanuel Macron has changed his mind a lot on many issues. But he has remained firm and consistent on one point: that of unswerving support for private sector profitability.
The president has never considered questioning workplace labour reforms or tax reductions on capital, even when analyses have doubted how effective these measures were. If one sees the pension reforms as continuing the pursuit of this policy, it makes it easier to understand the government's radicalness: to give up on it would be to damage its core identity, in other words its only real political function.
So for 'Macronism' the current reforms are existential in nature. In that context, the government's bid to humiliate and strip legitimacy from the social protests goes hand in hand with its political approach. Its points of reference here are clearly the repression of the miners' strike in Britain by Margaret Thatcher n 1984-1985, and the way that Greece was brought to heel between 2010 and 2015.
The aim is to reduce - by any means necessary - resistance to policies that favour capital, policies which are set to be further strengthened in the coming years.
A sense of electoral immunity
The third reason is political. Current political circumstances actually favour the government's decision to take on the social movement right to the bitter end. Simply put, the government is convinced it can avoid being punished at the ballot box. What moderated the toughness of French governments in the 1990s and 2000s was perhaps less their personal convictions, but more the fear that they would be chased out of office. In fact, on several occasions legislative elections that took place in the middle of presidential terms did result in defeat for the presidential party, with the main opposition party winning a majority.
That situation has changed. The French political landscape has now become a three-way split, with the Left being the third that is excluded in the final presidential duel between the neo-liberal Right and the identity-driven Right or far-right. On two occasions now Emmanuel Macron has been elected after a head-to-head contest with Marine Le Pen, whose far-right candidacy has been rejected by a majority of French people.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
It was as if all that the Macron camp had to do was to ensure their candidate got into the second round, by appealing to a social base made up of the better-off and pensioners. For sure, this was a reduced constituency but one which is much more likely to vote than young people and the working classes. Once he had achieved this aim, power fell into his hands like a ripened fruit, thanks to a majority of the country's citizens wanting to avoid an openly authoritarian and xenophobic government under the far right.
Bolstered by the state's institutions and armed with a sense of electoral immunity, which is useful for serving the social interests and economic logic that form its identity, 'Macronism' had all that was needed for it to succumb to excess – what the Ancient Greeks called 'hubris' – amid the feeling that it could defy the gods as it overestimated its own power.
Dangerous game with the far right
However, even though it held the levers to great power, the government knew that it was involved in a precarious balancing act. The fact that it failed to win an absolute majority at the legislative elections last June, with a united Left attracting the joint-highest level of support in the first round, came as a warning sign.
That gave the government a strategic reason to contribute actively to keeping its sense of electoral immunity. On top of this one should add that it has been aided by an impoverished political culture, consisting of a generation and a social grouping who have not been involved in making democratic gains. This situation is in sharp contrast to the past when, during the Dreyfus Affair or the years of the Front Populaire, the bourgeois Republicans were able to reach an understanding with the Left (which clearly acted collectively at the time) in order to stop the reactionary camp from taking over the regime.
The ranks of the 'Macronist' movement seems almost entirely unaware of this history. On the contrary, it is now the Left that is endlessly demonised as being 'far left', bracketing it with its supposed opposite number on the right; indeed, sometimes the Left is attacked even more than the far right. Everything is seen as fair game in order to prevent the Left from representing a credible and acceptable alternative, even at the risk that the far right may instead achieve that status.
This dangerous game was already in evidence during last year's legislative elections, when there was talk of a 'red peril'. That game has now moved inside the precincts of the National Assembly itself, with the unprecedented way in which the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) and its 89 Members of Parliament are being normalised. And that dangerous game has been clearer than ever during the battle over the pension reforms, with one of the most worrying trends in modern political life progressing at remarkable speed.
Amid shows of politeness, the National Assembly has been witness to a form of 'good manners front' between the RN and Macronist MPs. Proof of this came when an MP from the radical left La France Insoumise described Olivier Dussopt as a “murderer”. According to Le Monde, the labour minister was touched by the way the RN's leader Marine Le Pen defended him. “Thank you for your comments,” he is said to have told her, before stating clearly and publicly that “she has been rather more Republican that many others at this time”.
This episode illustrates a more general strategy that is being deployed in other areas, for example over the issue of 'wokism'. In this way, Macron supporters are trying to establish a form of political dualism which they think they can control to their own ends, but which in fact puts the entire country at considerable risk. What took place in Italy, which recently saw the arrival of a post-fascist leader at the helm of government, shows the extent to which 'mainstream' politicians bear responsibility for the way the far right is becoming normalised.
One reason why this game is so dangerous is that by its very nature it cannot last. How can you call for a 'Republican surge' from the voters every five years if those who are seen as being outside that 'Republican' camp also include voters on the Left, who are nonetheless being asked to vote for the neo-liberal candidate?
In fact, Emmanuel Macron's strategy gets weaker the more it is deployed. But should we in fact interpret this strategy in an even worse way? If the presidential party's priority is to impose policies that are favourable to the interests of capital, this might imply that the social movement needs to be brought to heel and even that the Left is marginalised, accepting the risk that the neo-liberal Right will then have to alternate in government with the far right.
After all, the far right will not undermine these reforms, as it fully accepts the neo-liberal framework, especially if the social movement against the reforms is permanently weakened. The president's hubris thus seems to lie in his certainty that he wins whatever the outcome; either his sense of electoral immunity works, or he loses at the polls - to the far right - but his reforms stay in place.
Emmanuel Macron seems to have adopted, de facto, the old neo-liberal idea of 'neutralising' democracy that one finds coming from former figures on the Right such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. But as a result it is Emmanuel Macron, far more than the Left, who bears responsibility for the risk of a far-right victory. This risk is growing, as the far-right is piling up its resources inside the state's institutions and could portray itself as the solution faced with the crisis of legitimacy that all governments have faced since the 1980s.
How does one get out of the trap that Macronism has led the country into? First of all through resistance to the pension reforms, a resistance that consequently is both political in nature and something that is crucial for our democracy. Afterwards, this social movement needs to be maintained, in order to demand lasting democratisation of the economy.
In fact, the country is vulnerable on a number of fronts, faced with climate disruption and attacks on pluralist political models carried out by authoritarian regimes, whether in the domain of information or by playing on the interdependency that is forged under neo-liberal globalisation. To confront this there needs to be a plan which must as a minimum be inclusive and fair, and which repatriates key decisions on production and investment, based on the general interest.
The political Left and the social movement thus have linked destinies, and that of the regime's democratic future with them. This fight against pension reform now takes on the appearance of a major political combat.
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- The original French version of this op-ed article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter