APD Review | “Yellow Vest” protest highlights France’s deep governance dilemma

By APD writer Dong Yifan

Translated by Huang Zemin

Since mid-November, demonstrations in France featuring fluorescent safety vests, sparked by rising oil prices and organized also on the Internet, have snowballed. Up to 288 thousand protesters in more than 2,000 districts were up in arms, and in Paris alone, crowds of over 8,000 marchers took to the streets. There were even violent scenes on the Champs-Elysees where protesters clashed with police, hurling projectiles and torching cars. Two people were killed in accidents and more than 400 injured.

At the center of the storm stands French President Emmanuel Macron and his liberal economic reforms. Amid demands for the president’s resignation, pressure on his governance sees a startling rise. Macron was even greeted by an airport employee wearing a yellow security vest when arriving in Buenos Aires for the G20 meeting. People shared jokes about the encounter. At the root of the yellow vest protest are not only the public disaffection toward oil prices and the president, but long-term predicaments facing France’s governance.

The French have harbored complicated attitudes toward their government since the French Revolution beginning in 1789. They, on the one hand, welcome strong leaders such as Napoleon Bonaparte and Charles de Gaulle, who cured long-standing diseases with a dogged determination. On the other hand, once certain policies threaten people’s vital interests, they will, as common practice, go on strike and take to the streets, holding out for compromise of the government, hence well-known cultures in France of protests, strikes and anti-institution.

Under Western democracy, French leaders, whenever facing public outcry, tend to concede in a bid for short-term political interests rather than long-range welfare of the country, otherwise they will face a bad end as Charles de Gaulle who risked losing power amid widespread protests by students.

As a result, since France established alternating policies of interventionist and free market ideas after the World War II, long-term diseases in such fields as administration, employment, welfare and social security have been unwieldy. Leaders and ruling political parties have full knowledge of what’s at the core of the problems but few got the get-up-and-go to push through reforms.

Macron’s predecessors including Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande have also felt a longing to succeed, some even making attempts to destroy the old and establish the new before or after they took office, but eventually bowed to popular pressure. The so-called reforms were often much said but little done, or leaders are to exchange all political capital for slow progress and sink the chances of winning a second term.

Macron came to power under the banner of reform, progress and nonpartisanship. He, a onetime philosophy student, investment banker and former economy minister, boasts rich experience and sensible judgement on social ills. In special political spectrum and with non-traditional thinking, the president is eager to free himself from the shackles his predecessors faced and realize his vision for the country. Meanwhile, the legitimacy of him as the executive head of state is based on on-going reform and change for the better, a reason why voters preferred him to the far-right leader Marine Le Pen in the 2017 elections.

Confronted with the quagmire that beset quite a lot of French presidents, Macron chose to take the easy way out, bypassing debate and pushing ahead his reform agenda. Controversy arose over him, considered a kingly president, as an bad example for democracy or traditions of a republic. Moreover, the progressive neoliberalism Macron’s economic reform embodies reminds the public of his four-year investment banking stint and a 'president for the rich' as Macron is nicknamed is loathed by many in France.

Also, violence of his bodyguard, a succession of the resignation of cabinet ministers and anger at the president’s educational reform tarnished his image in parallel with weakening voters’ support. A recent poll showed Macron’s approval ratings down to 18%, even lower than those of the unpopular Sarkozy and Hollande, which hints a more complicated and punishing society Macron faces than before in a split, populist France which, together with the European Union, has undergone crises. A strong hand in governance turned out to be a failure in translating reform slogans into political achievements. The presidential power now is shaky, a trend in which the yellow vest protest is just a foregone conclusion.

Whereas the protest grew out of an eco-tax rise on fuel as Macron championed the Paris climate agreement and pushed ahead low-carbon economic development, for protesters it’s the final straw following economic downturn and rising inflation, and a tipping point of the public anger at Macron’s administration and the poor conditions it caused.

However, as Prime Minister Edouard Phillipe suspended the tax rise, Macron returns to the routine of one step forward, half a step back. With creeping challenges at home and abroad, the president has to inch through public outcry in France.

Dong Yifan, researcher of CICIR (China Institutes of Contemporary International relations Institute) of European Studies. His research fields include European economy and EU integration.

(ASIA PACIFIC DAILY)