Europe holds its breath as Macron scrambles to quell protests
Not just France but Europe should hope the tax concessions and minimum wage rise Emmanuel Macron announced on Monday will prove sufficient to quell more than a month of violent and destabilising anti-government protests.
With more than 1,250 people arrested, 400 injured and an economic cost running into billions, the gilets jaunes revolt represents a formidable challenge to the authority of the centrist president, widely seen by his critics as arrogant and out of touch. If he flunks the test, he will not be alone in paying a price.
Elected on a pledge to prove that France could be reformed – its flagging economy revitalised through tax and public spending cuts, plus sweeping changes to the labour market – Macron is also fervent in his defence of European liberal democracy.
Faced with a rising tide of rightwing,
Eurosceptic populism and authoritarianism, he has presented himself as a champion of multilateralism and a bulwark against “selfish … and dangerous” nationalism, warning as recently as last month, on the centenary of the first world war armistice, that old demons were resurfacing.
His difficulties in appeasing a diverse, structureless, social media-based movement of France’s underpaid and over-taxed “can’t make ends meet”, whose many often contradictory demands range from a higher minimum wage and more direct democracy to lower taxes, a larger public sector and even a spell of military rule, have already prompted joy among those who do not share his internationalist views.
“The left behind, the thousands of honest people massacred by the French government, are now on the street,” tweeted Matteo Salvini, Italy’s interior minister and leader of the far-right League, with whom Macron has fought a public war of words over Rome’s hardline anti-immigration policies.
Steve Bannon, an architect of Donald Trump’s election campaign, and who is now attempting to organise Europe’s nationalist-populist forces, said at a meeting in Brussels at the weekend: “Paris is burning. The yellow vests are exactly the sort of people who elected Donald Trump … and voted for Brexit.”
Trump tweeted that France should end the “ridiculous and extremely expensive” Paris climate accords and
“return money back to the people in the form of lower taxes”, while Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, highlighted the disorder on the streets and what he termed a “violent police response”.
Fragility at home leads, necessarily, to a decline in clout abroad. Macron has repeatedly said his international credibility stands or falls on his ability to implement domestic reforms, which now risk derailment in a scramble to save his presidency.
Macron’s pre-election ambitions of breathing bold new life into the European project through a revitalised partnership with Berlin have already been stymied by the relative weakness of Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, after her disappointing election results last year.
Four months before March’s EU parliament elections, which are forecast to bring major advances by the continent’s nationalist and illiberal forces, an enfeebled Macron at the head of a chaotic, insurrectional France is the last thing Europe needs.