The Paris street protests won’t faze Macron

France is on the brink of another revolution! The proles are swarming to the barricades and it’s only a matter of time before President Macron is dragged from the Élysée palace. 

That is the gist of some of the more excitable reporting about what happened yesterday in France. It was certainly a dramatic day after the government forced through its pension reform bill that will increase the age of retirement from sixty-two to sixty-four. It did so on the orders of Macron, deploying a controversial clause in the constitution — Article 49.3 — which legalises a bill without the need for a parliamentary vote.  

It’s becoming a habit of Macron’s. Since he lost his absolute majority in the National Assembly last summer, his government has on eleven occasions passed legalization with the deployment of Article 49.3. Previously, in the sixty-five-year history of the Fifth Republic, it had been used eighty-nine times.  

Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne was whistled and jeered when she announced to parliament on Thursday that the reform bill would not be put to a vote. Scores of mainly left-wing MPs rose to their feet and sang La Marseillaise. Last night Borne told a television interviewer that she was “very shocked” by the raucous scenes.  

Really? How did she expect opposition MPs would react to the government’s decision to bypass a democratic vote because they knew they would lose?  

Nor can Borne have been that surprised by what unfolded last night in cities across France as protesters took to the streets. A few thousand gathered on the Place de la Concorde in Paris, where Louis XVI lost his head, expressing their desire for a similar fate to befall Emmanuel Macron. By the end of the evening police were battling a hardcore of far-left demonstrators, some of whom set fire to the piles of trash that lay uncollected by the striking garbagemen. There were over 300 arrests. 

Marine Le Pen’s right-wing National Rally, and the left-wing coalition of Greens, Socialists and Communists have said that, unlike the other ten occasions when the government has used Article 49.3, this time they will collaborate in tabling a no-confidence motion.  

Were the motion to succeed, it would almost certainly result in the dissolution of parliament, a scenario that opinion polls predict would most benefit Le Pen. 

Macron believes the no-confidence motion will fail, or at least that is the gamble he’s taken. He has also taken a punt on his people. He would have anticipated a robust street response to his decision to pass the bill without putting it to the vote, a decision he justified by saying the “financial risks” of not increasing the retirement age to sixty-four are too great. 

Many French agree with him. An online poll in the centre-right Le Figaro has received nearly 240,000 responses to the question “Do you approve of the use of Article 49.3 by the government?” Forty-five percent said that they did.  

That still leaves a majority who didn’t, but how many of those are prepared to keep protesting? Since the demos began in January, numbers on the street have steadily dwindled, from around 1.3 million to the 350,000 who turned out on Wednesday. 

Among the myriad slogans scrawled on demonstrators’ placards are frequent references to May 1968, when for seven weeks France ground to a halt amid strikes and demonstrations. But Macron is confident he has little to fear from those brandishing the signs; they are either aging boomers trying to recapture their distant youth or soft bourgeois students. Unlike their grandparents, this generation are too addicted to their Xboxes and Netflix to brave the elements — and the police — day after day on the streets. 

Mathilde Panot, the parliamentary leader of the left-wing France Insoumise, described the government’s use of Article 49.3 as an alarming “authoritarian turning point.” Another MP, the center-right Aurélien Pradel, declared that France was on the brink of a “democratic breakdown.” 

There is a certain irony to those remarks given that today marks the third anniversary of the start of France’s first lockdown. It would be just for a couple of weeks, said the president, to flatten the coronavirus curve. That two weeks turned into two months. But worse was to come. By the end of 2020, Macron had imposed a 6 p.m. curfew and those intrepid souls who did venture out were required to have about their person a written explanation for their presence on the street.  

The following year, Macron introduced a “health passport” (backed by parliament) and for months millions of French citizens were stripped of many of life’s pleasures. France is the only EU nation where unvaccinated medical staff remain suspended — and Macron has never shown the slightest contrition for what he inflicted on his people.  

Where were the opposition MPs in 2020, raging against a breakdown in democracy or warning against an authoritarian turning point? Had Marine Le Pen had her way, schools would have remained shut for months while dozens of Socialist MPs called for the Covid vaccine to be mandatory.  

The response of the political class in the West to Covid was a catastrophe, the consequences of which will be felt for years to come, whether economically, educationally or socially.  

But lessons were learned. As Professor Neil Ferguson admitted to the Times of London in December 2020, European governments thought they “couldn’t get away” with acting like the Chinese Communist Party. But they did. It turns out that the peoples of the West aren’t quite as committed to their democratic freedom as they imagined. 

If Macron got away with it three years ago, then why shouldn’t this latest act of authoritarianism succeed?

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.