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Anger against Macron widens and radicalizes

2023-03-26T10:54:30.182Z


The pension reform activates a constellation of protests in France that go beyond retirement at 64 years of age. And they point to the president


The anger against the French president, Emmanuel Macron, radicalizes every day: violence – that of the protesters and that of the police – has been introduced this week in the protest against the pension reform.

And the movement expands: the demands accumulate.

An environmental demonstration in a rural area in western France ended on Saturday with several vehicles of the gendarmerie set on fire and officers and demonstrators injured.

The image of challenged authority, extremely harsh clashes and the risk of tension getting out of control and causing greater evils give the measure of the political and social crisis in France.

There is something very new in this protest, which creates new revolutionary icons like the burning garbage that sows urban centers with bonfires.

And something very old: Paris in flames, the storming of the Bastille, the Commune.

In France each revolt invents its icon.

There was the guillotine, the cobblestones of 68, the yellow vest a few years ago.

The response against Macron for raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 has found its own: a pile of garbage burning in the most central streets of Paris, the portal of a City Hall like the one in Bordeaux on fire, the fire that fascinates and destroys

Striking employees gathered on Friday around a bonfire in front of the Gronfreville-l'Orcher refinery.LOU BENOIST (AFP)

The waste, tons of uncollected waste in the French capital due to the cleaning strike, is the perfect fuel for these incandescent barricades.

Institutional buildings or law enforcement have also become the target of agitators.

The most massive protests that France has experienced in years ask for much more than the resignation by the Government to increase the retirement age, that concrete and modest utopia, "two more years of happiness", as the sociologist Michel Wieviorka summed up this week in a colloquium in Paris organized by the publication

Le Grand Continent

.

There are, yes, those who demand a little more: that the retirement age be lowered to 60, as the socialist François Mitterrand did in 1982.

Protesters clash with riot police Thursday in Paris.

samuel aranda

Demonstrators carry banners against Macron at the monument in the Place de la République in Paris, on Thursday.Samuel Aranda

Confrontation between police and protesters on Thursday in Paris.

samuel aranda

Mountains of garbage accumulate in the Latin Quarter of Paris, one of the most visited by tourism, on Wednesday. Samuel Aranda

Dozens of Gendarmes are preparing for a charge against the protesters on Thursday in Paris. Samuel Aranda

Protesters next to a burning barricade on a Paris street, Thursday. Samuel Aranda

Workers of a hairdressing salon observe from a distance the massive demonstration on Thursday in Paris. samuel aranda

Garbage accumulates on a street in the Latin Quarter of Paris, on Wednesday.

samuel aranda

A young woman carries a banner mentioning that March 2023 is the new May '68, on Thursday during a protest in Paris.Samuel Aranda

Some firefighters put out a fire caused by burning garbage on a street in Paris, on Thursday.Samuel Aranda

Riot police, on guard, during the massive demonstration on Thursday in the French capital.

samuel aranda

A restaurant worker puts out a small fire with water during a protest in Paris on Thursday.Samuel Aranda

Several protesters burn remnants of garbage as police fire tear gas in front of the Paris Opera, on Thursday.Samuel Aranda

But now they have joined the protests en masse, adolescents and university students who have come out to demonstrate for the distant pension, but also for a more abstract and at the same time powerful aspiration: a better future.

There is more.

Teachers ask for better salaries.

There are booksellers in the marches who remember the physical exhaustion that their profession represents.

The other day a listener was speaking on France Inter radio to explain that he was a small-town merchant and complain that Macron had awarded the Legion of Honor to Jeff Bezos, head of the giant retail company Amazon.

Each one, claiming it.

Young and old, like the parliamentary opposition and the unions, rise up because the reform has been approved with article 49.3, which allows the adoption of a law without a vote.

The claim is already about something other than just pensions.

It is about democracy, a democracy that the protesters consider shaken by the adoption with 49.3 of a law that is opposed, according to polls, by 70% of the country.

And it goes from Macron.

From hatred of Macron.

—I can't see Macron even in paint.

But to see 16-year-olds demonstrating for retirement at 60!

Please!

The speaker is a 72-year-old man, suit and tie, briefcase in hand.

He walks quickly down a narrow street in the

rive droite

, the bourgeois neighborhoods on the left bank of the Seine in Paris.

His name is Benoit.

He doesn't like his president, but he likes even less to see his fellow citizens against a measure that seems to him to be common sense.

It is Thursday, March 23, the day of the demonstration.

Tens of thousands of people parade along the boulevard, a hundred meters away.

The chants —against Macron, against fascism, against the police— are heard from this alley occupied by dozens of riot police ready to intervene if things get complicated on the boulevard.

And they will get complicated: at the end of the night there will be 127 detainees and several injured police officers and demonstrators.

But meanwhile, Benoît has gotten into a spontaneous discussion with Charles, a 29-year-old man who is on his way to the demonstration.

Charles says: "Macron is Robin of the Woods in reverse, he takes from the poor to give to the rich."

Benoît replies: “But, stop working at 60?

No!

Not all jobs are shit!"

History books, and those who lived through it, say that scenes like these were common during the student and worker revolt of 1968. The street became an agora, strangers talked among themselves.

All of this was over half a century ago, but every time in France a social movement threatens power, the comparison at hand is May 68.

"March 23 is the new May '68," read a banner in English at Thursday's demonstration.

And another in French, and addressed to Macron: "You have given us 64 [years], we will give you a May of 68."

Dominique Schnapper, grande dame of French sociology and former member of the French Constitutional Court, remembers May '68 well. She, then a young sociologist, was reproached by her colleagues on the left for not taking sides against her father, Raymond Aron, intellectual nemesis of Jean-Paul Sartre and the sixties.

Although these were not easy times, when she compares March 2023 with May 1968, there is almost nostalgia.

“The atmosphere today is totally different,” he says by phone.

“In 1968 there was something festive and youthful.

Now what there is is hatred and resentment.

"It's like Ukraine doesn't exist"

Adds Schnapper: “I think the stakes are higher now than then.

The foundations of democracy are questioned in a much more serious international situation.

It is as if Ukraine did not exist.

There is a kind of provincialism on the part of some French people who believe that they exist alone in the world”.

One could speak of a “French mystery”, to quote the title of an essay by demographers Hervé Le Bras and Emmanuel Todd.

Why does a reform that, with variations, was adopted years ago in almost all the countries around France give rise to weeks of strikes and demonstrations in this country and put the president on the ropes?

The Socialist deputy Jérôme Guedj responds: “On the one hand, it is explained by the way in which it has been done.

They say [Macron and the Government]: 'We will make you work more because we need savings to finance other things and because we have decided to lower taxes for a few.'

People have understood that retirement was used to collect a tax on their lives.

The tax, according to this argument, is paid in the form of two more years in working life.

But there is another explanation, according to Guedj: “It is something cultural.

Retirement in France is like cheese and Zidane.

It is in the DNA of the country.

It is about the relationship with free time and with a model of social protection.

The French have understood that, if today they give in with pensions, tomorrow it will be the turn of social security.

And behind all this, without a doubt, is Macron, who crystallizes a part of this rejection”.

One of the most respected intellectuals in France, the historian Pierre Rosanvallon, sees a problem of legitimacy in the reform.

He considers that, although the president is assisted by what Rosanvallon calls “procedural legitimacy” —legality—, he poses a problem of social and moral legitimacy by not conforming, according to the majority perception, with the general interest.

Macron has not been able to convince the country that it had to work for two more years and in trying to do so, it has angered even more.

"Because of his personality, because he has this 'brilliant little prince' side, he is not the most suitable person, he provokes epidermal reactions", assesses the essayist and consultant Alain Minc, who has known the president for years, and has advised him.

"Macron is the dream of the educated urban bourgeois, a quarter, a third of the French," he points out.

"But for 70% he is repulsive."

That Macron resorted to 49.3 to impose the reform due to lacking sufficient votes in the National Assembly is one of the arguments of those who question its legitimacy, even though this article is perfectly democratic and constitutional, it has been used a hundred times during the Fifth Republic and , a few days later, the Government passed two motions of censure.

It is legal, but a majority in France is against it.

In the

Le Grand Continent

colloquium , historian Michelle Zancarini-Fournel spoke of “a new crisis of consent”.

“There is a former professor from the Collège de France who explains that there are two legitimacies”, laments Schnapper in reference to Rosanvallon, “and there are deputies who say that the street will govern.

We return to the worst moments of the French Revolution: the street against the representatives.

There is also a kind of extremism that is becoming the majority.

If you add Jean-Luc Mélenchon [leader of the anti-capitalist and eurosceptic left] and Marine Le Pen [leader of the extreme right], they are in the majority.

And the hatred against Macron becomes a major phenomenon."

Schnapper confesses: "I see no way out."

The solution, according to all the opposition and the unions, is simple: for Macron to park the reform, as President Jacques Chirac did in 2006 with the controversial youth employment contract after weeks of protests.

But Macron does not want to be Chirac, who was called, in his last stage, "the lazy king", due to his tendency to postpone the most uncomfortable decisions.

The reform, in any case, is pending the Constitutional, which must be pronounced before April 21.

Minc believes that the social crisis —the union mobilizations, the protests in the street— sooner or later will end up fading away.

"The river will return to its course", he said on Friday morning in his office, hours after the riots on Thursday... "Seeing students burning garbage and reliving history... We have all done it, I was in the 68. With this we are squarely in the history of France, in the cliché.

Nothing worries me.

Instead, the way Macron acts, I find that he mismanages the political crisis.

The unknown is whether this winter of discontent will transform into an even broader movement in the spring — the eternal comparison with May 68 — or if France will turn the page in the coming weeks.

If this will be a social movement as it is experienced periodically in this country, or if it is facing a "great political crisis", as defined by the historian Michel Winock in his reference book, Hexagonal fever: a disturbance

that

puts endanger the republican system of government.

In an email, Winock responds: “The current crisis is less an institutional crisis than a political impasse because a minority government finds itself facing a heterogeneous opposition unable to take over, to govern.

In summary: two inability to govern face to face”.

Adds the historian: "If the riots and violence grow, if there is a misfortune, if there are deaths, we do not have a replacement solution."

And he concludes: “Everything will depend on popular mobilization.

Unions can play a role, both in reducing and increasing the fever.”

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Source: elparis

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