BY MARK TAC

As ever with La Belle France, nothing is really as it seems.

The unpalatable truth for the French is they have never recovered from their Revolution which was a bloody disaster for the country as was the fact that Napoleon grabbed power, wrecked Europe, and left France exhausted. All they could do was give a Gallic shrug and carry on.

Five years ago, Hollande stitched up the presidential elections which landed us with Macron, and a year ago the little man won again, by default.

This time, one can find few who will admit voting for him. He won’t believe this, but he was lucky to have faced Le Pen in the run-off. She had watered down her policies – dropped leaving the EU and softened her immigration policies – but no matter what she did there was absolutely no way the French would have voted for someone called Le Pen to be their President. However, she got a very respectable 41.4% of the votes, her best result.

Fortunately, she has stepped aside and someone else from her party will stand for the next presidentials. It does France no good not to have a credible opposition.

Macron’s joy was short-lived. He and his party lost their mandate in the Parliamentaires which followed. So, now France has a President who cannot pass any of his policies because his PM Mrs Borne(which means bollard in English) hasn’t got a majority.

Except this is France, and he/she doesn’t need one.

There is an article of law, 49.3, which allows the President and PM to over-ride Parliament and force through whatever laws they want, whenever they want. La Borne has used this now 10 times. To all practical ends, democracy in France is in temporary (I hope) abeyance.

You might ask, Why doesn’t the Opposition majority gather and oppose this state of affairs? The answer is broadly two-fold. First, the opposition is composed of every shade of political lunacy, from far right, through mild right (Les Republicains who are in practice Blairite like the Tory Party), through old Labour, to radical far left, communists and Marxist greens. Une véritable tour de Babel!

And second, the opposition parties all did rather well in the last parliamentary elections and don’t want to risk forcing a new election when they might lose seats.

So, Macron forced through his “flagship” new retirement/pension laws and made an arse of himself.  He is not a man who has any sort of a grip on reality.  Little Johnny Head in Air, really.  To avoid what he thought would be an inevitable loss, he bottled and got La Borne to use art 49.3 again (the 10th time), but then, enough of Les Republicains (mild right, Fillon types) cynically agreed to vote with Madame Bollard and the new law passed with a normal majority.

All this went down badly with the unions and, I would say, most people in the country who if they didn’t mind about the pension age change were unimpressed by the shenanigans. Remember that the retirement age used to be 65 but then Mitterrand, who was another lying socialist (he lied about having been in the Resistance when in fact he went off like a good boy to work in German factories), reduced the retirement age to 58, to appease the unions, bien sur.

As in the UK, the French unions have engineered beneficial “members” pension rights which they rigorously defend/enforce with strikes. No French President has had the balls of Mrs Thatcher (may she stop spinning in her grave at how the Tories are behaving) so the unions, notably the communist-led CGT, normally get their way. The unions said they would oppose the new laws and they have. Most major cities have seen strikes and violence. All these demos are driven by the unions but this time they won’t win so the troubles will go on.

There is no doubt the violence is encouraged by Macron’s Minister of the Interior, a childish-looking but vicious man called Darmanin who supports Macron to the hilt and loves sending in his CRS to batter demonstrators. Of course, this has always been a French government pastime.

I remember seeing the CRS battering long-haired students in riots in Paris in 1968/69. It’s what they do.

And Darmanin gives his CRS carte blanche. So the CRS happily battered the Gilets Jaunes for two years (mainly older and definitely poorer people, many from the countryside), they battered the Liverpool footie fans (who were found innocent of anything at a subsequent inquiry… which might be a first for scousers), and the Freedom Convoy people in the Bois de Boulogne (my wife saw them launch their totally unprovoked attack), they savaged a recent demonstration SW of Poitiers where dozens were seriously injured (eyes put out, broken arms etc, objecting to an official plan to inundate large areas with water for big farms), and now they are getting stuck into the riots about the new pension laws.

However, not everyone in France supports this opposition to Macron. This alone will not be his nemesis, as some British papers like to suggest. Many people see nothing wrong with raising the pension age from 62 to 64. It is the unions which object, the EDF, SNCF, water, civil servants etc where some have grown used to being able to retire in their late fifties with generous pensions. Most independent artisans or professionals do not enjoy anything like the benefits of union/fonctionnaire retirees. Union monthly pensions are at least a generous 5,000 euros and well upwards. An agricultural worker might receive 900 euros / month.

And these are the same unions of course which did absolutely nothing to protect workers in the health sector during covid, when Macron sacked nurses, doctors, firemen, hospital workers, care home workers etc who refused the jabs. Well, he didn’t sack them exactly, which might have allowed them to go on the dole, he merely stopped them working and stopped their pay.  And now he complains there is a shortage of staff in hospitals because he still refuses to restore them to their jobs.

Then, add the rise in the cost of living. I believe prices have gone up more here than in the UK, though for similar reasons. Governments cannot shut down society as they did in 2020, close large chunks of the economy and at the same time dosh out free money on the scale they did during covid, to the tune of 400+ billion, some say 600+ billion, and then expect everything to go back to normal when they lift the restrictions. This lunacy is why there is a cost-of-living crisis.

All that is bad enough, but Macron is also a fervent admirer of the Agenda 2030 ideology produced by the EU, the WEF, the UN, WHO and other radical Left globalists. These ideologues are quietly pursuing their insane plans, like Climate Change, Net Zero, the ban on fossil fuels, digital identity cards, and digital currency to ban cash (which was tried in Sri Lanka and was a total disaster).

Macron pretends to be on the right, but he is as far left as you get, determined to follow these socialist ideologies which will take France and any other country which follows these lines further into la merde. Some people are beginning to see all this will end badly. But not enough yet.

So, to sum up, there is dissatisfaction in every direction in France. And Macron is doing pretty much everything wrong. Generally, the French shrug in their Gallic way, and then just carry on, at home, at work, just getting on with life.

Because there is nothing they can do. Raising the pension by two years isn’t serious enough to create real, cohesive violence on the street. Some of the ideological madness in the pipeline almost certainly will, and wreck society.

Will any or all of that bubble over during the Rugby World Cup or the Olympics? Probably, almost certainly if these issues have not been resolved by then. The demonstrators will showpiece their complaints.

The reality is that France has got another four years of Macron and article 49.3.  He is as disliked by everyone as one of his predecessors was but that President, whatever anyone thought of him, was a greater man than Macron in every single respect. General de Gaulle loved France. Macron, breathtakingly egotistic, hates the country of his birth and its people.

Mark Tac is a Brit living in France.