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Published in 2021, What Ails France? is a provocative but constructive critique of the French model of technocratic, elite leadership. Amidst the ongoing protest over pension law and retirement age in France today, Brigitte Granville’s book remains as relevant as ever. In What Ails France? Granville views the malaise as a peculiarly French symptom of the difficulties experienced by many advanced industrial democracies in the face of globalization, technology, and mass immigration. Granville brings trenchant criticism to bear in this wide-ranging survey of the political economy of contemporary France, building her case for the prosecution on the self-reinforcing rigidity produced by a narrow Parisian oligarchy that is both entitled and intellectually hidebound.
In the guest blog below, Brigitte Granville offers her take on the pension reform protests, tracing the tensions deep into the French governing system, and warning of the social and economic challenges to come.
I sometimes feel a conflict of interest as an author and a French citizen. France would be a happier country if my book What Ails France were less topical. But since the book was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press (MQUP) in 2021, the problems I described and tried to explain keep recurring. The present wave of mass protest over President Emmanuel Macron’s pension reform is the most conspicuous symptom since the yellow vests (gilets jaunes) uprising in 2018—19. Both these episodes, together with the preceding multi-year intensification of civic unrest, have the same root cause: a deep division between a large part of French society and the country’s ruling establishment consisting of a tightly-knit group of Parisian technocrats with the unmistakable features of an oligarchy.
Triggers should not be confused with root causes. The ‘yellow vests’ maintained large-scale weekly street demonstrations for long months after Macron’s cancellation of the diesel fuel duty hike that had first sparked their protest movement. This indicates that deeper grievances were in play. Likewise today, the vast scale of public protests seen since January stems from discontents ranging far wider than the contested increase of the pension age from 62 to 64 years. These successive explosions reflect growing disillusionment with a governing elite perceived to be indifferent to people’s economic struggles and unsympathetic to their values and identities.
Protests flow from people’s determination to make their concerns seen and heard. Aggravating the present unrest is a widespread feeling that the pension reform is a ‘slap in the face’ for the French public. Far from being heard, the democratic will of French citizens expressed in last year’s presidential and parliamentary elections has been ignored. On the surface, Macron was re-elected to a second term on a policy platform that explicitly included an increase in the pension age. But this reform mandate was dubious since Macron’s election victory had been negatively motivated – that is, his unpopularity as the incumbent was outweighed by the desire of a majority of voters to keep out his hard-right opponent, Marine Le Pen. Macron himself admitted as much when he said: “I am aware that many of my fellow citizens voted for me not because of my program but because I stand against the hard right. I will take due account of the nature of this vote.” Underlying the nature of that vote, the parliamentary election that followed a month later (June 2022) deprived Macron of his majority in the National Assembly. But Macron ploughed on with his pension reform regardless. Unable to muster a majority for the enabling legislation in the Assembly, his government resorted to the right accorded to the executive branch by the French constitution’s notorious article 49.3 to enact a new law – i.e. the pension reform in this case – without parliamentary approval. The parliament’s only recourse in such cases is to pass a motion of no confidence in the government, after which the president would be obliged either to change the government or to call a new (i.e. pre-term) parliamentary election. On 20 March, the resulting no-confidence motion was supported by 278 deputies, a comfortable majority of those present and voting in the Assembly that day but fell nine votes short of the required absolute majority of 287.
The pension reform’s formal legality, confirmed by the Constitutional Council on 14 April allowing Macron to sign the bill into law, has clashed with the perceived political illegitimacy of ramming through such a controversial measure while refusing consultation and compromise – especially with the leaders of the main union groupings which are now leading the protest movement. Media attention has shifted to the violent troublemakers on the fringes of peaceful union-led street demonstrations. The pro-Macron camp tries to take advantage of such violence as a way of shifting the debate from the pension reform to the question of public order – “who rules France, the mob or legitimate authority?” The problem with this line goes deeper than merely playing down the associated incidents of police brutality. For at stake here is precisely the legitimacy of the French system amid ever more widespread perceptions of a democratic deficit.
This clash will continue festering indefinitely between periodic flare-ups of ever increasingly intensity and, therefore, risk for the country’s ability to rise to the social and economic challenges posed by the crises of globalization. Macron personifies an elite that has, in its own mind, a determined patriotic project of ensuring that France demonstrates the reforming prowess and credibility required for global economic competitiveness and political influence. The result is an authoritarian centrism that fundamentally believes it is acting for the common good but fails to bring people along with it. A healthy democracy depends on a widely shared sense of fairness and people’s dignity being upheld. A narrow ruling establishment convinced that it knows best what is in people’s ‘real’ interests will continue drifting towards more serious upheaval unless and until communication and engagement with people is radically improved. My What Ails France book discusses constructive approaches to this challenge of rebuilding trust in the areas of economic policy, education and training, state accountability and transparency – all amounting to a renewal of the French social contract.
Brigitte Granville is professor of international economics and economic policy at Queen Mary University of London.
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