French President Emmanuel Macron has given himself 100 days to try to overcome the social crisis caused by the disputed pension reform wanted and approved by his government despite huge strikes and protests. Macron said he wanted to do it through a series of measures that “take care of the daily life of the French and improve the quality of public services”. Citing the issues of work, security, immigration and health, he spoke of “one hundred days of peace, unity and action at the service of France”, referring to a hypothetical “major political construction site” similar to that for the renovation of the Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris, started after the great fire of 2019.
It seems that through the achievement of visible and medium-term results Macron wants to overcome the isolation in which he finds himself and the serious social and political crisis that France is going through. However, the goal he has set himself is very complicated, also because there is the risk – the security according to some commentators – that the French far-right parties will capitalize on the current discontent, stealing consensus from the president’s party.
On Monday 17 April, three days after the promulgation of the pension reform, Macron made a speech of about a quarter of an hour broadcast on all televisions which had the tone and rhetoric of speeches in which a candidate for an important office is announced , or those made to the nation at the end of the year: «Is this reform accepted? Obviously not,” Macron admitted immediately. But the answer, he immediately added, “can be neither immobilism nor extremism”.
After repeating that the pension reform was “necessary”, Macron said that the street protests showed a problem that goes beyond the outright refusal to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64: “I heard in the demonstrations a opposition to the pension reform, but also the desire to give meaning to one’s work, to improve conditions, to have careers that allow one to progress in life. Nobody, and above all I, can remain deaf to this request for social justice”.
Macron therefore spoke of three projects: a new “labour pact”, interventions on “crime and illegal immigration” and “progress for a better life”. As far as work is concerned, the president said he wanted to bring the “social partners” back to the negotiating table to discuss the consequences of the pension reform “without limits and without taboos” on issues such as income from employment, the progression of careers, the improvement of working conditions, strenuous jobs or the employment of older people.
Macron then took up the issues of the right and the extreme right on crime and immigration, effectively establishing a link between these two elements (a link which has never been proven by studies and analyzes on the two phenomena): he explained that it is necessary to «strengthen the control of illegal immigration and improve the integration of those who join our country”. On the subject of security, he took up an announcement already made a year ago on the creation of 200 new gendarmerie brigades operating, therefore, outside the cities: «The fight against all forms of delinquency, against all fraud, social or fiscal, will be at the center of government action with strong announcements since the beginning of May,” he said without adding anything else.
On the third project, that is, on the fact that “each of us reaches the certainty that their children will be able to build a better life for themselves”, Macron spoke of education and health, citing, among other things, the increase in teachers’ salaries, the end of waiting in the emergency room and coverage by the social security of hearing and dental prostheses. The president concluded his speech by launching an appeal «to all forces of action and good will. Our mayors, our elected officials, our political forces, our trade unions, all together”.
As Macron spoke, in various cities in France – Marseille, Lyon and Rennes among others – there were spontaneous anti-government demonstrations, while the left opposition organized a cacerolazo, a form of noisy protest with pots and ladles in the streets or at the windows. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the left-wing party La France Insoumise, said that Macron “is completely disconnected from reality” and that the sound of the pots is more “right” than his words. Marine Le Pen, of the far-right Ressemblement National party, said that Macron, with his speech, “could have re-established a link with the French” but that he chose instead “once again to turn his back on them and ignore the their sufferings”.
Many commentators, including Matthieu Goar in Le Monde, have argued that Macron’s declaration of good intentions hides the absence of real political responses to the crisis.
Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne, much criticized for having obtained the approval of the pension reform through a constitutional article which made it possible to avoid the parliamentary vote, has remained in her position for now, creating even within the presidential majority itself splits and tensions. The political context in which Macron and Borne move was already uncertain: that is, that of a National Assembly with a relative majority in which, now even more, Macron will struggle to carry out his program, being increasingly isolated and not having reliable allies with which to build compromises and stabilize his second mandate.
With the one hundred days proposal (the first assessment of which will be made on July 14th) Macron is trying to buy time and gradually find, on individual measures, allies inside or outside parliament. It will be more complicated outside than inside.
After Macron’s speech, the trade union organizations issued a joint press release to say that the President of the Republic “shows that he has not yet understood the anger expressed in the country” and relaunched May 1 as a day of struggle and protests. Sophie Binet, the leader of the CGT (one of France’s largest trade union confederations), said that Macron’s speech could have been made by ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence that manages to simulate human conversations with users. Laurent Berger, secretary of the CFDT (another large French union) reiterated that a “minimum of decency” is needed and that “reconciliation had to be made on the issue that created the social explosion: the pension reform”.
According to Le Monde, the idea is rather shared, even among those close to Macron, that the “social resentment” created by the pension reform will last for months and perhaps years. And that the protest against the pension reform “has crystallized a much broader anger than frontal opposition to the shift in the retirement age”, which will benefit far-right parties. The reform has touched part of the electorate already won by Le Pen or that is tempted by Le Pen, an electorate towards which the far right has shown empathy.
Faced with this possibility, there are also those who have spoken of the need to put an end to the Fifth Republic, which began at the end of the 1950s with the approval of the seventh republican constitution of France: «When the social crisis and the democracy are one» a change has become «the only credible way to put an end to the crisis», wrote for example Mélanie Vogel, a senator elected by the French living abroad and head of the Green party in Europe.
Contesting the forcing that Macron has allegedly used to govern France so far, Vogel says that the Fifth Republic has produced «the verticality of power, an absurd centralism, (..) the absence of dialogue, contempt for the social partners, the cult of the leader and the oppression of Parliament”. He says that all of this “has weakened trust in politics, in parties, in institutions” and that a new constituent process should build a “fully parliamentary, fully representative Republic, one that finally brings France into the times of modern democracy”. Today France is a presidential republic.
