Has France found its Thatcher?

Emmanuel Macron had it coming, said Silvia Ayuso in El País (Madrid). As night follows day, French presidents sooner or later run into fierce opposition from militant unions. Last week, some of the 150,000 workers of the state-run rail network, SNCF, began a three-month battle to stop the government curbing their generous pay and benefits. For two days last week, just one in seven high-speed trains were running and regional services were limited; a third of Eurostar crossings to London were called off. The hard-line CGT and other unions plan to continue such two-day stoppages every week until the end of June. Air France pilots are striking too. It’s all too reminiscent of 1995, when Jacques Chirac was forced to back down after a massive strike paralysed the country for weeks. And in an eerie echo of 1968 ( see page 29) students added to the chaos by staging protests against Macron’s university reforms. Will Macron too be forced to accept defeat?

Macron is avoiding the taboo word “privatisation”, but that’s the logical outcome of his reforms, said Fabien Grasser in Le Quotidien (Esch-sur-alzette). The SNCF will turn from a public institution into a public limited company, with the state as majority shareholder. Whatever Macron says to the contrary, the ideal of disinterested public service “will yield to the logic of profit”. It isn’t really Macron’s doing, said Politico (Brussels). France is under pressure to comply with EU directives to open its rail services to private competition by 2020. Germany and Britain have already done so – SNCF itself owns a 70% stake in Keolis, which operates in the UK. But France has been dragging its feet. The reforms would enable private operators to challenge SNCF on high-speed networks within two years (and regional trains within five).

In its present state – owing s46bn – the SNCF couldn’t survive the competition: it just can’t go on guaranteeing jobs for life and retirement at 52. So the government actually has a good case, said Pascal Perri in Les Échos (Paris). But ministers are messing it up by introducing silly schemes of their own, such as a road “eco-tax” to help pay for the railways. All that will do is enrage car drivers. Rail reform was never high on Macron’s agenda, said Leo Klimm in Süddeutsche Zeitung (Munich), so it’s odd he should pick this fight now. Maybe he hopes to emulate Margaret Thatcher and be seen as a resolute reformer. But if he has to bow to the unions, he’ll have jeopardised the passage of far more essential reforms – reducing high taxes on business and sorting out the universities. Yet the strike is also make-or-break for CGT boss Philippe Martinez, said Politico. France’s unions aren’t as strong as they used to be. But the ranks are outraged at Martinez’s failure to block labour reforms, and his hard-line advisers are urging him to stand firm in the present strikes.

Macron has also got to face down the students, said Capucine Gilbert in Ouest-france (Rennes). He wants to change the present system under which every student who passes the baccalaureate high school exam is entitled to go to university in their home area. This has put such pressure on popular subjects like law that universities have had to resort to selecting students by lottery. To the fury of student radicals, Macron now wants oversubscribed universities to select on merit instead. And an attack by masked men on students protesting in Montpellier has now sparked action across the country – the undergraduate campus of the Panthéon-sorbonne in Paris has been occupied.

Nurses and energy workers are joining the strikes as well, said Laurent Joffrin in Libération (Paris), and the government looks to be in trouble. The disputes may all have disparate causes, but they share a common theme: the French reverence for the idea of the state as social protector, and the perennial resistance to reform. That still appeals to many people in France, on the far-right as much as the Left. It’s hard to see them letting go.