2023-04-30 11:15:26
The hundred days, the ‘hundred days’were until now in France the period between March 20, 1815, when Napoleon He returned to Paris from his exile on Elba until July 1 of that same year, when Louis XVIII was restored, after his final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo. But since last April 17, they have also been the time that President Emmanuel Macron has given himself to appease the country and relaunch his second term, which, upon completing its first year, is seriously affected by the social upheaval and the institutional crisis that has caused the pension reform, which raises the retirement age from 62 to 64 years.
The time that remains until the appointed date, July 14, the day of the national holiday, has begun to run. Also the Government, which, in a first attempt to calm the waters, has removed its promised immigration reform from the agenda, since it does not have a majority in the Assembly. But the gap is very large between the French and a president with a reputation for being godlike and arrogant who has not done the minimum exercise of self-criticism after deciding to carry out his reform against everything and everyone, without listening to the street, without the minimum of social agreement. and with his back to Parliament, by decree.
For days, the pots and pans have been chasing the head of state and his ministers wherever they go. “There is a very broad movement of discontent, which began in January with large demonstrations, then turned into spontaneous protests and clashes with the police and now into pots and pans, with a more playful nature but which also enervate the government,” he notes. Sebastian Roche director of research at the CNRS and professor at the Sciences Po University of Grenoble.
A key May Day
“Macron could have thought that the movement would stop with the recognition of the legality of the reform by the Constitution, but what we have seen instead is a transformation of it,” said this expert in statements to El Periódico de Catalunya, from the Prensa group. Iberian. In his opinion, this First of May is going to be a key date And if the unions achieve a great mobilization, as they have promised, “the situation will be delicate.” “If this happens, France will enter a new stage because Macron is not going to move and the unions will feel strong and neither will they,” he says.
The rejection of the French president is not only manifested in the street, but also in opinion polls. The latest from the Ifop institute shows that only 26% of the French are satisfied with the president’s management, approaching the 23% with which he bottomed out during his first term, in December 2018, at the height of the yellow vest crisis, which did then force him to reverse his intention to raise fuel prices. Since he was re-elected president on April 24 of last year, his popularity has fallen 15 points, and the polls give the winner to the far-right Marine Le Pen in the next elections.
The French pension system –the third most expensive of the countries of the OECD after those of Italy and Greece – was considered a historic conquest of the left and a victory of social progress since in 1982 the socialist François Mitterrand lowered the retirement age from 65 to 60 years and set the number of years of contributions to achieve the maximum pension. Already then there were those who put the cry in the sky warning of the increasing life expectancy and aging population. And in response to this unquestionable reality, Macron is not the first to get his hands on it. This has been a very long battle that has been burning France for decades, with which several presidents have stumbled.
In 1993, the centre-right government of Prime Minister Edouard Balladur raised from 37.5 to 40 years the number of working years for a maximum pension. President Nicolas Sarkozy (also conservative) increased the retirement age from 60 to 62 and was the socialist Francois Hollande who gradually raised the years of contribution, which would be 43 years in 2035. Macron lowers that date to 2027 and places the retirement age at 64 years.
Deficit of 13,500 million
The new reform is necessary, argues the leader, to avoid a deficit that in 2030 would be 13,500 million euros. Nothing that was not in the program that led to the polls in April of last year. “Democracy is saying what is going to be done and doing what has been said,” the leader replied to a woman who confronted him dialectically in one of her trips around the country, in Occitania.
But it is not only this reform that punishes the most precarious jobs and the people who started working earlier that has unleashed this broad social movement against the president, who already began his second term with half of the French against it. The leader prevailed in the second round with 58.4% of the votes compared to 41.6% for Le Pen. But he did it with a 28% abstention and after having achieved only 27.8% of the votes in the first round, with which his victory was due in large part to the vote borrowed from what in France is known as the Republican Front to stop the extreme right. In the legislatures that followed, the polls deprived the presidential formation, Ensemble, of the majority in the Assembly.
In this context, the emphasis Raquel García, researcher at the Elcano Royal Institute, to explain the dimension of the current protests. “This movement channels two issues that the electoral processes of last year revealed: the discontent of citizens for the decline in their living conditions due to the loss of purchasing power and the distrust of citizens towards their institutions“. “The current moment shows a fairly deep gap between political representatives and the demands of society and reaffirms a erosion in leadership of Macron that we already saw last year”, affirms this analyst.
An erosion that the leader himself seemed to take note of when on the election night of April 24, on the Champ de Mars, at the foot of an illuminated Eiffel Tower, he promised to “unite the French” with a “renewed management of power “. As if he was aware that his personalistic way of governing and away from the feeling of the majority street, he deserved an amendment to the whole.
But not. Hiding behind a constitutional article, the head of state has carried out the pension reform by decree and ignoring the parliamentary vote. And despite the fact that the Constitutional Court has endorsed the reform, this way of acting that confirms its absolutely vertical conception of power has ended up enervating many people in the country that precisely lit the strict separation of powers.
Parliament’s functions
“The French are very clear that Parliament’s role is to vote on laws and they are very unhappy that it has not been able to do its job,” says Roché. “People demonstrates against a way of governing, without listening to unions and the street, which decides in an authoritarian way”points out this analyst.
“Macron reaffirms himself as the Jupiterian president who wants to be”, García emphasizes. Trying to turn the page, the head of state has decided to dedicate part of these 100 days that have been given to multiply meetings with citizens and tour the country, a strategy that he has already used for the yellow vest crisis. But the fracture with the French is deeper than then and, due to his way of being and acting, the strategy can turn against him.
“Pans are for cooking”, released the demonstrators who thunderously received him in an Alsatian town. And in another gesture more ridiculous than effective, some prefects prohibited their use and that of “mobile sound devices” in the vicinity of the president.
Le Pen, silent
Tone outputs that contrast with the silence observed by Marine Le Pen, which is the great beneficiary of this crisis. Next to a Macron who seems insensitive to the concerns of the majority of the French, she does know how to channel the discontent of that great social mass affected by the loss of purchasing power. After having achieved the best result in history in the presidential elections and having allowed her formation, National Regrouping, to form a group in the Assembly for the first time, Le Pen’s image continues in clear progression.
If the presidential elections are held today, the far-right leader would exceed 30% of the vote in the first round and would win with 55% in the second. Macron cannot run for a third term but beyond those hundred Napoleonic days that he has granted himself, he has four years left -difficult, without a parliamentary majority and without a strong party behind- to shorten the abyss that separates him from the French and go closing scars. Otherwise, the legacy of the head of state that he made of reforms his flag to modernize France it will be throwing the country into the arms of the extreme right.
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