‘YELLOW VEST’ PROTESTS ROCK FRANCE
PARIS - France was surveying the damage Monday after another weekend of violent “yellow vest” protests rocked the country.
In the capital, the protests left behind charred car frames, shattered shop windows and vandalized monuments as well as a presidency in crisis.
What began as unrest mostly in the provinces over a tax on diesel fuel now, three weeks later, has become a full-blown uprising against President Emmanuel Macron. The protesters clad in high-vis roadside safety vests straddle the political aisle and have little in common save for the anger they feel toward their president and what they perceive as his out-of-touch, monarchical leadership.
“Macron resign” read the graffiti on the Arc de Triomphe monument, where protesters also smashed the face of a Marianne statue, a symbol of the French republic.
“Macron resign” shouted high school students demonstrating in Nice on Monday. Left-wing leader Jean-luc Mélenchon called on him to resign, as well.
Macron likely isn’t going anywhere. There is no mechanism in the French constitution to forcefully remove a president from office. A successful vote of no-confidence in the French parliament could force him to restructure his government. But even if someone prompted such a vote - and no one has - Macron’s party controls a majority of seats in the lower house, and it would be difficult to get to the 289 votes necessary. There are also no midterm elections in France, so the next time Macron will need to seek voter approval would be if he runs again in 2022.
Relative to European leaders such as British Prime Minister Theresa May and German Chancellor Angela Merkel who lead shaky coalition governments, Macron is in a stable position.
Still, the trajectory of his presidency is now in doubt.
“This could be fatal for Macron’s agenda,” said Francois Heisbourg, a political analyst with the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Paris.
Macron, Heisbourg said, was elected on two main platforms: Creating an ever-closer union within Europe and enacting domestic reforms. When his grand ambitions for further European economic integration stalled, he could say that German Chancellor Angela Merkel got in the way. Macron will have no one to blame if his government abruptly rescinds the fuel tax that is set to go into effect next month as a crucial part of France’s commitments to combat climate change.
“Whether he could survive politically and electorally if he essentially has his agenda broken, I don’t know,” Heisbourg said.
French media commentators have compared the violent spectacles of the yellow vests on Paris’s Champs-élysees to the student uprisings of 1968, after which French President Charles de Gaulle was forced to concede to certain demands. The following year, De Gaulle resigned the presidency.
Macron has been a leader without any serious opposition for most of his term.
He was elected in May 2017 in a landslide, with more than 66 per-cent of the vote. And he managed to reshape France’s entire political landscape in his own image, demolishing the traditional political parties on the moderate left and right and combining many of their supporters into his centrist coalition. That new faction, La Republique en Marche (“Republic on the Move”), won an absolute majority in the French Parliament the next month, with new deputies Macron handpicked.
Macron has certainly used his power. He has been successful in pushing through labour reforms that his right-wing predecessors had been unable to accomplish, forced to backtrack as they all were by crippling strikes and protests. Macron also slashed France’s wealth tax, which earned him the eternal adoration of the country’s elite and the ire of progressives.
Smaller protests followed each of those moves, and periodic strikes shut down the country’s train system, but nothing and no one was able to stand in Macron’s way. Nothing, that is, until now.
The steep decline of his approval ratings in recent months has taken even some of his political allies by surprise. His numbers are currently as low as 26 per-cent, according to one November poll. His administration has sought to portray the yellow vests as political extremists from the far right and the far left, but polls suggest 72 per-cent of French voters support the movement, although that support is felt more strongly on the extremes and among France’s disaffected center-left.
In the protests this past weekend, more than 260 people across the country were injured, including at least 133 people in the capital, according to the Paris prefecture. Three deaths have been associated with the protests.
The French Government has weighed the possibility of imposing a “state of emergency,” a temporary period of heightened security, until a compromise of some kind can be reached. Prime Minister Edouard Philippe met with political opposition leaders on Monday, in advance of a forthcoming parliamentary session on Wednesday that will likely determine the specifics of the government’s response. Philippe is also meeting this week with representatives of the yellow vests.
Macron, meanwhile, canceled a planned trip to Serbia this week.
He was criticized for being in Beunos Aires during Saturday’s violence, attending a conference of the Group of 20 - and advocating for the type of globalized economy that has hurt workers in the post-industrialized French provinces.
It didn’t help that one of his parliamentary deputies, Elise Fajgeles, could not identify the minimum national salary when pressed during a televised debate with two yellow vest representatives. “You don’t know,” said one of the men. “And you still claim to be a representative of the French people.”