Macron faces his worst political crisis with the street in tension

"Macron, to the bonfire!" Shouts the crowd as they throw a life-size image of the President of the Republic into the fire.

Later, he sings: “Louis XVI, we have beheaded him;

Macron, we can do it again."

This is what Place de la Concorde looks like on a Friday night, the same place where on January 17, 1793 the French guillotined Louis XVI.

This is how things are in France at the end of winter 2023, a country in anger against President Emmanuel Macron for having imposed on Thursday, without a parliamentary vote and by expeditious means of article 49.3 of the Constitution, the pension reform.

The reform contemplates increasing the legal retirement age from 62 to 64 and advancing the requirement of 43 years of contributions to collect the full pension eight years earlier than expected.

Seven out of ten French people oppose these measures.

The project, an electoral promise by Macron upon being re-elected in April 2022, has tensed the country since Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne presented it in January.

Eight days of national mobilization have been held that have massively brought the French to the streets.

And these weeks strikes have been called in key sectors such as transport, energy or public cleaning in Paris.

Spontaneous protests and riots continued this Saturday in Paris and other cities for the third day in a row.

It had been years since the unions had united as a block against the Government.

It had been decades - possibly since the protests and strikes that in 1995 forced President Jacques Chirac to reverse his reforms - that a presidential initiative had not sparked such broad rejection.

The tension skyrocketed after the Government resorted to article 49.3, which allows to settle the debates in the National Assembly and adopt a law without submitting it to a vote.

Macron opted for this path after verifying that he had a difficult time obtaining a majority of deputies in favor.

In the legislative elections of June 2022, the macronistas lost the absolute majority of seats.

Borne had already used 49.3 ten times, but never for such an unpopular law.

On Monday, the opposition – from the radical left to the extreme right and including some centrists and conservatives – will measure their forces with two motions of censure.

If they succeed, they will bring down Borne and his government and nullify the reform.

A burning barricade, this Saturday in the city of Nantes during one of the demonstrations against the pension reform.

LOIC VENANCE (AFP)

Macron is facing the biggest social crisis since the

revolt in 2018. And the biggest political crisis since he seized power in 2017 by defeating the old parties and the extreme right, and promising, as the essay's title stated, which he published then, a

.

Now

is one of the slogans that can be read on the graffiti in the Place de la Concorde in Paris amid tear gas and police charges.

And the bold young president who reined in the extreme right in France when this current was in its favor, and who was going to modernize the country, risks being weakened for the remaining four years of his second term, even if he manages to impose the

And this, in an environment of pessimism and existential malaise ―despite the lowest unemployment in more than a decade, despite one of the most robust welfare states in the world, despite a still prosperous economy― that makes the diagnosis that Jean-Paul Sartre formulated more than 60 years ago: “France was once the name of a country;

let us take care that in 1961 it is not the name of a neurosis”.

Nobody defends the reform, apart from the macronista ministers and deputies, and many without excessive conviction.

There are no forums of intellectuals in favor of his pension project, although the measures he proposes are far from being extremist, as some detractors paint them, and although they have been applied in a similar way in the main neighboring countries, without provoking a reaction comparable.

Few defend the president.

"He's very lonely."

This is how someone who worked with Macron, then Economy Minister, in the government of the socialist François Hollande, sums it up, someone who participated alongside him – and sometimes clashing with him – in the parliamentary battles of that time.

Manuel Valls, former French prime minister, former councilor in his native Barcelona and far from the political front line, defines himself, quoting Raymond Aron, as a "committed spectator".

He doesn't like what he sees in France: "I'm worried."

Valls has no doubt: if he had been a deputy - he was during part of Macron's first legislature, as an independent in the Macronist ranks - he would have supported the pension reform.

And if he had been prime minister, or president, he would have activated, as Macron and Borne did this week, article 49.3.

He believes that the alternative, the defeat of the law in the Assembly, would have been worse.

But he expresses fundamental doubts not only about the content of the reform, but also the way in which Macron has governed without achieving, neither in his first term nor after his re-election, reconcile the French, an eminently political people, where the State is the object of all the anger and at the same time everything is expected of him.

"In Spain there is not the same relationship with politics, it is not a centralized country like France, and the Spanish do not believe that politics is going to change everything," Valls analyzes in a café in the Saint-Germain-des-Près neighborhood.

"In France, politics is as much about the atomic bomb as it is about garbage collection or setting the maximum speed on the highway."

The former prime minister refers to the power of the State and the president, which ranges from having the nuclear button at hand to road safety.

This makes him one of the most powerful heads of state in modern democracies.

And, at the same time, in a monarch, the figure in which all the anger, the neuroses of the nation are projected.

"There is a terrible feeling of decadence in France," says Valls.

And he specifies: "It seems extremely exaggerated to me."

That it is exaggerated, however, is not an obstacle to its existence.

It is a widely shared impression: this country is no longer what it was, public services are deteriorating, there are a lack of doctors or hospital beds, public education is losing excellence and, despite being a nuclear power with a permanent seat on the Security Council from the UN, he suddenly discovers that he lacks enough tanks and ammunition to help Ukraine.

In this context, a reform that is perceived as an attack on social rights is the last straw.

To this is added that, after a few years of continuous electoral calls, the French will not go to the polls until 2024 with the European elections and, later, until 2026 with the municipal ones.

And another problem, according to Valls: unlike in Germany or Spain, where there is still an alternation between the old center-left and center-right parties, in France this system was blown up when Macron came to power, and today there is no moderate opposition to the president, or is very weak.

"Since there are no elections and there is no alternative, the pressure cooker is at its maximum," sums up the former prime minister.

"Not having a solution is worse."

If the motion of censure wins, Borne and his government will resign and Macron will be able to name a new one or dissolve the Assembly and call new legislative elections.

If he lost these elections, the effects would be incalculable.

One possible outcome would be a chamber even more ungovernable than the current one, perhaps with Marine Le Pen's far-right party, the National Rally, as the first group.

In September, Alain Minc, advisor to several presidents and a regular in the halls of power, ventured, in a conversation in his office in the center of the capital, what would happen if Macron anticipated the legislative elections: "If I lose them, I do not exclude not at all to leave."

The other scenario is that the motion of censure fails.

So Macron may try to continue Borne as prime minister.

Or appoint a replacement to make visible a change of course, perhaps with a government coalition with the moderate right.

The political horizon will begin to clear on Monday.

The social horizon will be more complicated.

For the first time since the start of the protests against the reform, violent episodes have been repeated since Thursday, with protesters clashing with the police and images of burning garbage in Paris or the assault on a neighborhood town hall in Lyon.

“There is obviously a possibility of radicalization and a temptation for violence,” observes Luc Rouban, a political scientist at Sciences Po.

“But violence is limited in scope in politics, those who participate in it are useful idiots of the government.

It might entertain journalists for a couple of days, but not those who live in Paris or the big cities.

After a while, this reinforces the demand for authority, the demand for public order.

And what is the party that says: 'We will make social policies, but we want more authority'?

It is the National Regroupment and that is why today it is in a position of strength to instrumentalize this anger”.

Macron's legacy takes shape.

He has wanted to be the reformist president, but he will also define what he comes after.

The presidential elections are in 2027. "The negative legacy," says Frédéric Dabi, from the Ifop survey institute, "would be that, like Barack Obama in the United States, who gave the keys to the White House to Donald Trump, he would give them to Marine Le Pen.”

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