The millions of French people who have taken to the streets for two months or who have been on strike to protest against a pension reform that is more accounting than social have changed nothing. Against the majority opinion of the population, against the union common front and the opposition of the parties, President Emmanuel Macron, out of hubris, will have ended up imposing his law without submitting it to the vote of a polarized National Assembly. Amazing situation. The Borne government is showing in this affair a deafness which is equaled only by the exceptional breadth of the objections which were expressed, with one voice, against the said reform deemed socially unjust. Raising the legal age from 62 to 64 deserved debate, not chaos, comments, in an editorial and with many others, the newspaper The echoes. While waiting for the protest movement to run out of steam, it risks becoming more radical in the meantime, conveniently justifying the application of police repression.
This great crisis (re)raises an important question about the state of our societies and democratic dialogue: if there is a right to demonstrate, where does the right to be heard begin?
At the same time, another patent example of governmental deafness, with serious consequences, is the one given to us for weeks by Israel, where the far-right government that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made for himself is going from forward with a judicial reform that sabotages the foundations of the rule of law, despite the emergence and resistance of an unprecedented citizen opposition movement.
In the near news, see Greece where, following the rail accident which killed 57 people at the end of February, the population is not getting angry in the face of clientelism in power and the general deterioration of public services. Consider also the massive strikes that recently took place in Britain against the economic policies of the Conservative government. Everywhere, in the four corners of the planet, these demonstrations of social anger, all expressing the same deep collective “fed up”, are both noisy and inaudible. Politicians sometimes adapt, and from time to time back down based on ad hoc electoral considerations.
Additional examples of the chronic deafness of the political classes, among others: what progress in gun control in the United States resulted from the mass movement of young Americans who united in the wake of the killings who killed 17 people in a high school in Parkland, Florida in 2018? None. And what urgent political changes have the world’s relentless ‘climate marches’ produced, as a new IPCC brief warns that humanity is burning away its last chance to limit global warming?
In this 20e anniversary of its outbreak, the disastrous war in Iraq deserves a reminder in this regard: the first months of 2003 had given rise in the United States to anti-war demonstrations such as they had not seen since Vietnam. This did not prevent the West, with the notable exception of Canada and France, from overthrowing Saddam Hussein without UN approval. If only, among other objections, we had listened to the street…
If, of course, all demonstrations are not good to wait for and, in this case, what is happening in France is not safe from corporatism and populist diversions, it remains that this “battle pensions” presents an extraordinary textbook case.
Mr. Macron decided this week by saying that “the crowd”, read the broad social opposition movement to his reform, had “no legitimacy in the face of the people, who express themselves, sovereign, through their elected representatives” . This is precisely where the shoe pinches.
Tellingly, the fact is that “executives and higher intellectual professions” occupy 60% of the seats in the National Assembly, even though they represent less than 10% of the French population. By reducing the democratic exercise to parliamentary representation and the arithmetic of parties and elected officials, Mr. Macron is ostrich in the face of an indisputable trend, namely that the confidence of citizens in the value of elections is weakening.
The demonstrators and the strikers do not dispute that it is necessary to reflect on the functioning of the pension system in view of the aging of the population. On the other hand, they are angry with Macron for not understanding that the worker and the nurse do not live the same reality as him – that work cannot be reduced to a commodity.
By ignoring broader social dialogue, pushing through his reform under the guise of constitutional legality, Mr. Macron gives the impression that he has not learned the lessons of the Yellow Vests movement – and ultimately be more willing to talk to Vladimir Putin than to the French themselves. To weaken politically, he misses an opportunity to lead by example in the face of the contagion of the illiberal regimes against which he claims to fight.