Macron Faces Economic and Political Challenges

  By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

France faces a winter of discontent. There is the threat of blackouts, rising living costs, and the insecurity following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has upended politics throughout Europe.

Cities around France are turning off streetlamps and shutting off illuminated advertising signs and other outdoor lighting to curb electricity use. Homes are lowering thermostats. Some schools will start heating classrooms by burning wood to conserve natural gas.

Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne has called on businesses to make energy savings. Companies will be required to cut their energy use by10 per cent or face enforced rationing of electricity and gas.

The left-wing coalition Nouvelle Union populaire écologique et sociale (NUPES) organized a march against the high cost of living on Oct. 16. Organizers said 140,000 people came out, adding to growing defiance and anger about inflation, three weeks into a refinery strike that has caused fuel shortages across France.

The time for talking is over, French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said a day later, as the government ordered fuel depot staff back to work to try to restore supplies.

Why is this going on? Have the French not had their say via recent elections? Or does the political process no longer work properly?

Jedediah Purdy, a constitutional scholar at Duke University Law School, maintains in his recent book Two Cheers for Democracy that the decisions that most affect our communities are often made outside the political realm entirely, as market ideology, constitutional law, and cultural norms remove collective life from electoral decisions. 

But when people complain, they are vilified by the political establishment. In France not long ago, for example, farmers angry about government policies that were putting them out of business, who protested by wearing yellow vests, were quickly vilified.

“Immediately, the protesters were denounced as xenophobes, anti-Semites and homophobes,” observed French social geographer Christophe Guilluy. “The elites present themselves as anti-fascist and anti-racist, but this is merely a way of defending their class interests.”

In his 2019 study Twilight of the Elites, Guilluy contends that the divide between the global economy’s winners and losers in today’s France has replaced the old left-right split, leaving many on “the periphery.” There is no unified French economy, and those cut off from the country’s new economic citadels suffer disproportionately on both economic and social fronts.

The revolution is coming, he warns: “The existing order will finally break down not as the result of some decisive event, but as the result of a slow process of social and cultural disaffiliation of the working class.”

The French are increasingly distrustful of politics and greatly divided along ideological lines, notes Jean Garrigues, author of The Temptation of the Saviour, an analysis of France’s political culture. A professor in the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Orléans, he observes that different communities “talk to one another less and less.”

President Emmanuel Macron, who had promised to turn the country away from discord, knows full well his popularity has slipped dramatically since he first appeared on the scene as a presidential candidate in what seems like a lifetime ago, winning a stunning victory in 2017.

Macron won a far less impressive second term in April, in a runoff against his right-wing opponent, Marine Le Pen. And in the legislative elections that followed in June, his centrist coalition lost an absolute majority in the National Assembly, while Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (National Rally) did extremely well, rising from eight seats to 89.

Seemingly humbled by the fractures in French society exposed during the elections, Macron promised to rule in a new way, with fewer dictates from above and more collaborating. So he announced the creation of a council with members from all parts of French political and civil society, holding regular meetings all across the country, to find answers to some of the country’s most pressing problems.

To underline its importance, he called it the National Council for Reconstruction and set Sept. 8 as its inaugural meeting. But, confirming his predicament, opposition political parties boycotted the meeting, as did many of the country’s powerful unions and the head of the country’s Senate. They denounced the council as a publicity stunt and a way to bypass democracy.

Meanwhile, the country’s nuclear industry faces troubles that have forced Electricité de France (EDF) to temporarily shut down 32 of France’s 56 nuclear reactors. The outages at EDF, which is also Europe’s biggest electricity exporter, have sent France’s nuclear power output plunging to its lowest level in nearly three decades.

With deficits spiralling and public debt at historic highs, Macron made raising the retirement age a few years from its current level of 62 one of the key planks of his re-election campaign. Left-wing political parties are gearing up for a fight over these efforts.

Le Pen, meanwhile, has denounced both the actions of Putin’s Russia and the “imperial vision” and “dangerous war-mongering attitudes” of the European Union. According to her, economic sanctions hurt the French more than Russia, especially because they’ve sharply increased the price of oil and gas.

Macron admitted in a speech in August that France has entered “the end of abundance” as it finds itself “confronted with a series of crises, one more grave than the other.”