France’s new Economy Minister, 36-year-old Emmanuel Macron, who has been tasked with tackling long-delayed reforms to reverse the country’s decline, is having a hard time. Every statement of his, it seems, provokes a storm of abuse from the politicians to the public.
Macron, a former investment banker who was given his cabinet job less than two months ago, almost immediately suggested that the 35-hour working week — introduced by the Socialist government in 2000 with the aim of reducing unemployment by “sharing” the available work — could be done away with. He was roundly insulted.
Shortly afterwards, he mentioned that 20 per cent of a Breton pork abattoir workforce, laid off because of a plant closure, would find it difficult to get new jobs because they were illiterate and could not, for instance, pass a driver’s licence test, barring them from a number of available jobs.
The reactions were so venomous that he was nearly punched in the face on the floor of the House by an MP from his own party, Olivier Dussopt.
“You’ve grievously insulted my mother! She’s a labourer, she’s got no degree, she’s been laid off twice already!”
Macron had to issue a lengthy public apology. Macron favours workfare over the current long-term benefits handed out to France’s 3.5 million unemployed and suggested in a recent interview that recipients had “duties” as well as “rights”.
Cue more outrage, with L’Humanite, the Communist daily, howling that he was hand in hand with the employers’ federation to “guilt” the jobless. Macron seems to specialise in straight-talking: In identifying core problems of the French economy and naming them.
This is making him one of the most unpopular people in France, because saying blunt truths is seen there as an unforgivable act of aggression.
“The banker Macron? We don’t know him, he’s never said or done anything that was remotely of the Left,” the maverick Socialist defector, Jean-Luc Melenchon, said in a radio interview. “He’s not one of us,” a columnist in the left-leaning Le Nouvel Observateur thundered. “He’s not just from any bank: He’s from Rothschild’s.” Forty-plus years ago, when almost a third of the French used to cast their vote for a Soviet-backed, avowedly Marxist Communist Party, few reproached president Georges Pompidou’s early career at the same Rothschild’s Bank. Strangely enough, the level of class invective in France has risen today in inverse proportion, it would seem, to the shrinking of the actual working class.
From 40 per cent of the population then, blue-collar workers have dwindled to half of that and are looking in petrified anguish at the possibility of yet more jobs being outsourced abroad. Apart from the employees of former state monopolies such as SNCF, the railway network, or EDF, the electricity giant, who remain under the iron protection of specific statutes ensuring job security, French workers are aware that if they lose their jobs, they won’t find anything half as good again. The vast majority of the French not directly employed by the state (about one quarter of the workforce) live in a state of pervasive fear of unemployment that is probably impossible to overstate.
One quarter of the under-25s are unemployed; while employers also actively discriminate against over-50s. France is depressed and gloomy. More and more, my native country reminds me of the Britain I knew from my days at school during the Winter of Discontent in the 1970s, those grey and pessimistic times when the joke was that the last person leaving England should remember to turn out the lights. We don’t have power cuts yet, but we have more and more power outages. The French, especially in the public sector, go on strike on the flimsiest of pretexts.
Moreover, the country is riven by class envy and doubts most of its public figures. The recent revelation that the leader of the largest union, the Communist-linked CGT, has a flat renovated for his use at the union’s expense, complete with home cinema and a terrace offering views of the Bois de Vincennes park in Paris, adds to the general feeling that none of the hitherto trusted figures holding power is deserving of their position. Like Macron, Francois Hollande is a graduate of the Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA), the elite civil service school that shapes most French political and economic leaders.
Hollande consciously decided to forget economic realism and pandered to the national psychosis to get elected in 2012. “My enemy is finance!” he thundered. He promised more civil service jobs, that he would reverse most of Nicolas Sarkozy’s timid reforms and cuts and insisted that he “didn’t like the rich”. Embracing their inner sans-culotte (the Left-wing partisans of the French Revolution), French voters seized his cue enthusiastically. But, soon enough, it became obvious that Hollande was part and parcel of the same comfortable insider crowd that has been entrusted with power in France for decades. Not only was he an enarque — the name given to a graduate of the ENA — who only hired other enarques; he even narrowed it down to giving three dozen top jobs to the friends he had made in his very own ENA class, between 1978 and 1980. The Brezhnevian intricacies of the tight circles of power in France are imperfectly understood by the population at large, but there is a certain tone, a way of telling the public that you know what they want better than they do, to which the French have increasingly grown allergic.
Marine Le Pen has tapped into this seething discontent: She now draws as many votes from the disenfranchised Left as from the discontented Right. This national dismay has been analysed for almost a decade by sociologist Christophe Guilluy in a series of essays that it has been fashionable to decry in academic and political circles. Mirroring the popular refusal to acknowledge economic reality and accept reform, the elites have dismissed Guilluy’s findings because they do not tally with their idealised view of how society should behave.
In, among others, La France Peripherique, Guilluy argues that the true losers in French society are the 60 per cent of the population who cannot afford the rents in gentrified city centres where the elite live; who do not want to live in the banlieues (inner-city suburbs) among recent immigrants; and are pushed by property prices further away — to mid-sized towns with few jobs and little opportunity and old brownfield developments between the true countryside and the large cities where most companies elect to move.
Unlike the difficult banlieues, where in addition to a genuine economic pull, the state pours money, builds infrastructure, subsidises schools and develops an entire benefits structure to try to assimilate the newcomers, the peripheral areas, where no rioting takes place, receive little attention and not much help. “The Socialists think Le Pen voters are stupid. When they say “these are people with not a single diploma”, what they mean is that if they were better educated, they would vote for them,” Guilluy told the French version of online magazine, Slate.
Le Pen’s avowedly statist solutions reassure those voters who feel that France’s declining economic situation mirrors their own. French schools have slipped in the global ratings, and fail some 150,000 children annually; the country’s vaunted infrastructure — trains, even the electrical grid — has started falling apart, because maintenance is neglected in favour of paying a workforce with golden contracts. When Jean Tirole, the founder of the Toulouse School of Economics, was awarded a Nobel Prize, the second this year for France after Patrick Modiano’s Prize for Literature, Manuel Valls, the Prime Minister, tweeted that this would “put an end to French-bashing”.
Yet, Tirole, a graduate of the elite Ecole Polytechnique, whose career was largely spent at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, shunned the Parisian grandes ecoles when he finally returned to France, electing instead to create his own institution in a provincial university. His Nobel Prize is no proof that the French system works; it is a gong awarded to someone who bucked the system.
Macron probably knows that a single tweet from his boss is not going to resolve the French malaise. When the French elected Hollande two-and-a-half-years ago, little did they know how fast things could deteriorate. Even hard-won economic success — in their case, Nicolas Sarkozy managing at least to keep things together and running during the financial crisis — can be reversed in moments.
All of this feeds even more into the kind of malaise that may eventually get Le Pen elected.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2014
