BY OZGE BULUR
In the last week of April 2017, when he was a candidate looking for ways to rack up millions of votes in the presidential race, Emmanuel Macron made a risky move. A notebook before him, he held a meeting with representatives of a tumble-drier Whirlpool plant in his hometown of Amiens in northern France ahead of the elections in May.
The company was planning to shut the operation in the country and move to Poland, which would amount to the loss of hundreds of local jobs. Hanging on the representatives’ every word, Macron seemed to be making much effort, taking down notes, or maybe sketching a stick man with an “Oh God, what am I going to do?” expression on its face. While “the bourgeois” candidate, as Macron himself put it, sat for a meeting with union leaders, his rival Marine Le Pen was outside the company, mingling with the big crowd of workers booing Macron amid the smoke of burning tires. In the meeting room, a question came for the thoughtful Macron from one of the representatives, “Why did you not come to meet the workers out on the parking lot? Not necessarily today but a month or two months ago?”
That behind-the-door meeting was a scene from Netflix’s documentary on the French candidate’s campaigning period, entitled “Emmanuel Macron: Behind the Rise.” As the documentary shows, Macron made that high-risk move, offering a meeting with workers at the site. He told a couple of members of the “En Marche!” campaign team, half jumpy and half self-assured, “I can’t look like I am hiding. We have to take risks,” and then he gave the gist of the whole move, with which he might have garnered enough support for his campaign: “We have to go to the heart of the fight, every time.” The enthusiastic candidate went out to talk with the workers, had it broadcast live on Twitter, taking all the credits Le Pen aimed to chalk up, no matter how tense the atmosphere turned.
After a few months of rising to the presidency, Macron visited the dryer factory taken over in September by a local industry group that wanted to maintain most of the jobs. The risky move he once made gave him some credibility in the eyes of workers, but for a short span of time. Now, only after a few months, neither Macron nor French workers are that hopeful. The 40-year-old president has been facing a test, the impacts of which may resonate for decades. The “fight” is much harder for Macron, pale by comparison to the Whirlpool incident. And today’s Macron has a home truth to face: The growing “yellow vest” protests are too big to handle with a single move!
Despite concessions Macron made the previous week, France saw a fifth consecutive weekend of “gilets jaunes,” or yellow vest, protests last Saturday. Apart from French protesters’ first-hand experience of the unending cascade of nationwide demonstrations, which have already filled the pages of many newspapers, I talked to a French teacher living in Turkey, in the capital city of Ankara, to learn what one would exactly feel while watching her/his house burn to the ground from afar, so to speak. Wanting to keep his name anonymous, the French teacher sounded like the right person observing the scale of the protests spreading across Europe like a brush fire. “In the beginning it was a bit confusing. This movement at first was mostly popularized by far-right politics,” he said.
According to the young teacher, just because the protests were instigated by the far right, a lot of people from the left-wing, even though they were also quite against the government and increase of taxes, were not in favor of going to the protests. As the recent numbers prove, however, the demonstrations expanded in a short span of time and evolved into France’s worst urban riot in a decade, posing a dire challenge to Emmanuel Macron’s presidency. Given the aphorism he uttered during the Whirlpool incident, could Macron, the youngest person to assume office in France, really go to the heart of the fight every time?
In the toughest test Macron has yet faced, around 136,000 people have taken part in the ongoing protests across France, including 10,000 in Paris. More than 1,400 people have been wounded, 46 seriously, and a sixth protester died after being hit by a truck at a protest roadblock last Thursday. Over 1,709 were arrested, of which 1,000 were in Paris. More than 100 remained in custody, according to authorities that spoke to Reuters. “It really struck my interest when I saw the number of people that were actually protesting and also how violent these protests had become,” said the French teacher, who is younger than Macron yet probably less hopeful than him about France’s future, particularly when it is under the rule of a man doing his utmost to play the hero.
FRANCE, A COUNTRY OF PROTESTS
The violent protests are definitely not incidental to Macron’s presidency. The culture of protesting in France matches the nation’s history. Like Louis XVI during the French Revolution in 1789, now Macron is caught in an avalanche of the society’s anger, although of a pretty different magnitude. “Protests in France are mostly situated with opposition to the government, and most of the time they are encouraged by a union or a syndicate,” the teacher said and added that the yellow vest protests have been a little bit different this time since they are strongly held by the common folk. Do the yellow vest protests only stand as a movement against the fuel tax increase? Most of the readers would agree with the French teacher, who gave an obvious and immediate “No” to the question.
During the first day of the protests on Nov. 17, people were maybe only protesting the tax increase until it mutated into a revolt against living standards and Macron’s indifference to the hardships of the poor. “A lot of people perceived it as a general attack against the poor by a very ultra-liberal government,” said the teacher with a serious tone, “People are just protesting more generally about the politics of Macron.” Called by a considerable segment of French society as “the president of the rich” due to his elitist disregard for the working and middle classes, Macron seems to have never underlined this one deep sentence of “Les Misérables” by the great French novelist Victor Hugo; “There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher,” or perhaps the maxim of “The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor,” from another Hugo novel, “The Man Who Laughs.”
A MACRONIAN CONSOLATION PRIZE
Macron once told his campaign team that he can’t look like he’s hiding, and the same Macron appeared on French television last week for reasons beyond his control, as the phrase goes. He announced an income increase for minimum-wage workers and tax cuts for some pensioners and overtime workers to quell weeks of violent protests. But was that even enough to go on with?
According to an OpinionWay poll for LCI television, 54 percent of French people want the yellow vest movement to end after Macron’s speech, which was watched by over 21 million people, while the public’s support for the movement was around 70 percent before his speech where he promised billions of euros in aid for the lowest earners. “He actually succeeded, which makes me quite sad, in calming down a part of the protesters, who in my opinion did not really understand what these measures would imply,” said the teacher, keeping his suspicious tone.
Macron’s concession includes a 100-euro increase in the minimum monthly wage, an end to taxes on overtime work as of Jan. 1 and the cancellation of the intended tax hike on pensioners with incomes less than 2,000 euros per month. He also asked profit-making companies to give workers tax-free year-end bonuses. However, Macron declined to reinstate the Solidarity Tax on Wealth (ISF) – imposed on taxpayers with assets worth more than 1.3 million euros – which his government scrapped in September last year. For the critical teacher and mostly probably for those having sided with the 46 percent vote in favor of the continuation of the protests, “What Macron did was something that entrepreneurs in France have been wanting for some time, which was to decrease the indirect salary of the workers, make them earn less just giving them more direct salary, completely cutting their social security and whatever comes after.”
COURTESY: Daily Sabah
