‘Look at me, I exist’: French protesters send message to Macron

Next to a roundabout on the outskirts of Troyes, 150km south-east of Paris, Sophie surveys the damp tent where she has spent much of the past two weeks. Wearing a fluorescent yellow jacket that marks her as one of the so-called gilets jaunes protesters against President Emmanuel Macron, she gestures at a table where well-wishers have brought fruit, bread and even smoked salmon. “We have more to eat here than at home,” she says, her voice barely audible over the din of passing cars and trucks tooting their horns in solidarity.

The 25-year-old waitress and thousands of other French men and women are threatening to bring the Macron government to its knees. What began barely two months ago as an online campaign against surging fuel costs has morphed into a nationwide social movement against high taxes, declining living standards, a self-serving political elite and a president deemed arrogant and out of touch. Worryingly for Mr Macron, surveys by Elabe and Harris Interactive suggest seven out of 10 French voters support the protests.

After two weeks of roadblocks and blockades brought parts of the country to a halt, a third consecutive weekend of protests in Paris last weekend exploded into the worst riots in the capital for 50 years. The country was stunned by images of hooded men battling riot police around an Arc de Triomphe daubed with graffiti.

“He is in dire straits. Except there is no political alternative,” says Zaki Laidi, professor at Sciences Po university. “The gilets jaunes are asking for more state and less taxes. It is impossible to accommodate.”

Under intense pressure, the government on Tuesday suspended increases on a petrol and diesel tax due to come into effect next month. But with fears of further violent protests in the capital on Saturday, it gave more ground, cancelling the tax rises .

The small policy concession was rejected by many gilets jaunes and France’s opposition parties as too little, too late. But it was still a screeching U-turn by a president who styles himself as the leader who will stay the course at all costs, unlike predecessors who failed to modernise France in the face of vested interests and political resistance.

Édouard Philippe, prime minister, admitted it was a “pivotal moment” for the government. It begs the question of whether Mr Macron, whose approval rating had sunk to 26 per cent even before last weekend’s violence, has the political capital and determination to tackle other big reforms, such as pensions, unemployment insurance and streamlining the state.

Are the reformist ambitions of Mr Macron finished? “I don’t think so,” says Gilles Moec, economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch and a former French central bank official. “But there will be a pause. There has to be a pause.”

The gilets jaunes movement began as an online petition against fuel tax rises in the summer co-ordinated by a cosmetics saleswoman called Priscillia Ludosky from Seine-et-Marne, east of the capital. She joined forces with a truck driver from the same region who wanted to hold a day of demonstrations. The petition ballooned to a million signatures and on November 17 nearly 300,000 people blocked road junctions, toll booths and fuel depots across France. And while the number of demonstrators has since shrunk — there is no formal structure or recognised leaders — the movement’s demands and ambitions have soared.

The protesters have tapped into longstanding grievances over low wages, falling living standards, the disappearance of manufacturing jobs and a retreat of public services and civic amenities in rural areas.

When she is not manning the roundabout in Troyes, Sophie, who refused to give her surname, is a waitress taking home €1,200 a month, around the minimum wage. Once she has paid €500 on rent, €180 on heating, €80 on telephone and internet and done a bit of food shopping, there is little left. “When my day off arrives, I don’t necessarily have the means to do other things,” she says.

For years France’s squeezed middle has suffered, their incomes too high for full welfare benefits but too low to make ends meet, says Daniel Bensept, 75. He admits he has a decent pension but says he is protesting to support those worse off than him. “It has been going on for a long time but it’s erupting now because Macron thinks we’re fools,” says Mr Bensept, part of the gilets jaunes group near Troyes. “He takes us for people who are worth nothing.”

The gilets jaunes are diverse in age, background and profession. Some are politically active, most are apolitical. They appear strongest in rural areas and the outskirts of provincial towns and cities where the rising cost of fuel has hit poorer motorists, dependent on their cars for work, hard. Many of them were already enraged by the government’s earlier move to cut the speed limit from 90km/h to 80km/h on secondary roads.

“The gilets jaunes  are a crisis of the countryside, of peripheral France,” says Aurélie Charillon, mayor of Prévessin-Moëns, a town in the east of the country. It is a movement of “firefighters, employees, craftsmen, teachers” for whom the car is essential to work.

“It is these French who have been forgotten by the governments of the last 20 years,” she adds, so when Mr Macron asked them to pay extra tax on fuel “it’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back”.

For Christophe Guilluy, a French geographer and author, the rise of the gilets jaunes reflects the same dynamic as Brexit in the UK and the election of Donald Trump as US president.

“Geography is the common point of gilets jaunes, Brexit and Trump, and the populist wave,” he says. These are people who feel left behind by globalisation, ostracised by the new economic model, who are seeking to preserve their “social and cultural capital”, he says. “What is very important with the crisis of the gilets jaunes is obviously the yellow vest itself: it says ‘look at me, I exist’.”

Mr Macron came to power in May 2017 promising to free the economy and make work pay. He has reformed the labour market, vocational training, education and the state railways. Business confidence has soared, growth has been solid and Paris has a thriving tech scene. But to many people outside the capital, there have been few improvements. Unemployment is stuck at close to 9 per cent. Household disposable income rose in 2017 and 2018, according to official statistics, but many citizens do not feel it. France is the most taxed country in the developed world, according to the OECD, with tax revenues at 46.2 per cent of gross domestic product.

The president has also made mistakes. In his first budget he replaced a wealth tax with a levy just on property in the belief that it would help to channel savings into the creation or expansion of businesses. Tax cuts for ordinary households had to wait. Its unpopularity saddled Mr Macron, a former Rothschild banker, with a reputation as a president for the rich.

French protests in numbers

Now one of the protesters’ main demands is the reinstatement of the wealth tax, something ministers said this week they were willing to consider, before Mr Macron slapped them down.

“We believed in Macron,” says Bruno Passe, a retired farmer from the eastern Champagne region. “He sold us a dream that he was going to change everything, and now we are fooled.”

It is not only what Mr Macron has done but how he has done it that has inflamed the protesters. Many want him to resign. The French barely knew their president when he was elected in 2017 in a run-off against the far-right leader Marine Le Pen. He had never held elected office and had only briefly served as economy minister. He built a party, La République en Marche, from scratch, made up mostly of political novices, that is still thin on the ground.

“Macron has no electoral base,” says Fadi Dahdouh, a councillor for the centre-right Republicans party in Troyes.

His movement was supposed to harness the energies of civil society to reform the country. But once in office he appeared to run the country from the Elysée Palace with a handful of advisers. When the political winds turned, Mr Macron was dangerously exposed. 

Some of his allies are desperate for their leader to recover that spirit of openness. “We need a complete change of culture,” says Aurélien Taché, an MP for La République en Marche.

Some optimists believe the protests could be an opportunity for the governing party. If the  gilets jaunes are so fed up with burdensome taxes, the argument goes, could this be a way to make the case for spending cuts and reinvigorating Mr Macron’s reform agenda?

“We have stumbled on an issue of tax increases,” says one ally of the prime minister. “In some ways it is quite reassuring. If the French want tax cuts they are going to have to accept that less will be spent on the public sector.” Many protesters want spending increases on benefits and rural services, however.

Some in the ruling party are also taking comfort from the fact that the opposition parties have, so far, been unable to capitalise on the gilets jaunes movement, whose diverse demands do not fit ideological patterns. The protesters have kept opposition parties at arm’s length.

But French politics is very fluid, thanks not least to Mr Macron’s emergence. “For the moment the political offer by the gilets jaunes is zero,” says Mr Guilluy, the geographer, “but tomorrow things will move very fast.”

Mr Guilluy and other observers fear that the gilets jaunes could be laying the ground for another ideological realignment. It would bring together far-left and far-right causes into one super-populist movement that is simply awaiting a leader, someone akin to Beppe Grillo, founder of the Five Star Movement now in Italy’s governing coalition.

France has a large anti-establishment electorate. Mr Macron won just 24 per cent of the vote in the first round of the presidential election but his far-right and extreme left candidates won 40.9 per cent between them.

“Macron was a man who made a movement,” says Laurent Bigorgne, director of the Institut Montaigne in Paris. “But what if the gilets jaunes is a movement that makes a man?”

The more pressing concern for the president is how to engage with leaderless protesters with diffuse demands while preventing further confrontations. Almost 90,000 police and gendarmes will be deployed across the country on Saturday to try and prevent a repeat of last weekend’s violence. Another rampage could force Mr Macron into a bigger policy retreat and even a change of prime minister.

“Certain [campaigners] don’t want to enter talks and start a dialogue,” says Benjamin Cauchy, a prominent gilets jaunes figure who says he has received death threats for advocating talks with the government. “Some have revolutionary intentions.”

Additional reporting by Domitille Alain in Paris