Macron’s watch is always wrong. This is not the time for his pension reform passed, with a constitutional shortcut, without a parliamentary vote and without the consent of the citizens. “We want a president of the poor”, shout the marches, but the president, trained in the schools of technocrats and raised in investment banks, has his eyes turned to the past, is convinced that he will make history by raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 years old.
In fact, it may seem like a light reform when compared to the tougher ones carried out in Europe and also in Italy where we had Professor Elsa Fornero who miscalculated. But in politics time is everything, one mistake and you’re done.
The gilets jaunes of 2018, the revolt over diesel that cost too much, the countryside that invades the cities: Macron did not understand or underestimated the deep malaise of society.
In France, workers, the public sector, trade unions, the opposition and even young people are rebelling, who are said to be most interested in reform according to the distorted vision of the president. That middle class has awakened which no longer sees the possibility of climbing the social ladder, but fears falling backwards.
The economist Thomas Piketty wrote: “Macron got the wrong era, he applies inappropriate recipes as if he had remained stuck in the neoliberal euphoria, in the world before the 2008 crisis, the pandemic and the war in Ukraine”.
We are in another era, the living conditions and aspirations of citizens have changed, who wonder if the time has not come for a turning point, to change the order of values. There will also be a reason why millions of workers leave their safe places voluntarily.
“We want to live!” they write on the walls of Paris. Here, that’s all: live! The system, as we know it, is no longer good.
Macron thinks about balancing the accounts, but gets the recipes wrong. Today the urgency is to fight growing social inequalities, hit the concentration of assets and wealth, tackle the climate emergency and the energy crisis.
In his first presidential term, the socialist Francois Mitterand introduced the “patrimonial solidarity” to face the crisis and was not afraid, with the legendary minister Robert Badinter, to abolish the death penalty. Why doesn’t Macron take the money where it is, why doesn’t he tax the richest, why doesn’t he raise levies on profits and rents instead of hitting workers?
Governments are gambling on their credibility and future on the tax authorities. Last year, British Prime Minister Liz Truss was forced to resign after just 44 days in Downing street due to a tax reform that threw the City and the Financial Times into panic, caused strikes, blocked health services and transport. Truss wanted to boost the economy by introducing tax cuts for the very wealthy. A disaster, like Brexit.
The novelty, the strongest proposal comes from the United States. President Joe Biden has presented a fiscal project that in Italy would be judged a Bolshevik threat. The Democratic president wants to introduce a minimum tax of 25% on the incomes of the twenty thousand super-rich (citizens with assets exceeding 100 million dollars) to finance public health care for the elderly for another twenty-five years.
Biden also aims to raise the tax on corporate profits from 21 to 28%, while the levy on income exceeding $400,000 a year would rise from 37 to 39.6%. Trump’s gifts to the wealthier classes would thus be reduced.
Corriere della Sera called Biden’s idea “populist”, therefore a rejection. Instead, after the grillina drunkenness, it would be good to recover the profound meaning of populism, which in Italy represents a history, a culture of when there was a people, made up of workers, peasants, artisans, employees and when being called populists meant a choice coherent of the field in which to fight.
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