France erupts in protests over rising cost of living

On Sunday, left opposition parties including the Greens, Socialists, and Communists led by France Unbowed leader Jean-Luc Melenchon, led a protest march in Paris on Sunday, of 140,00 people, according to the organisers, over rising cost of living and over governmental inaction against climate change. The left opposition sees the discontent and anger of the people as a good  opportunity to corner President Emmanuel Macron, who won the presidential election in April, but his party, New Movement, lost in the parliamentary elections in June.

Macron wants to reform the welfare-oriented economic policies in the country like pushing back the retirement age of 62 and reform the management of pensions. Macron wants to make France an efficient economy, but it seems that his reformist plans come at a wrong time.  One of Macron’s lawmakers recognised the difficulty in pushing economic reforms in France. He said, “I’m really worried. We need to find a route between the need for reforms and the fact that people are riled up and tired.” And this could prove to be difficult – to carry out the reforms and keep the people happy.

The immediate trigger for the massive Sunday protest march in Paris was the closure of four of the seven refineries of France’s largest oil company, Total Energies, as the trade unions held out, demanding higher wages. There is also a strong demand on tax on windfall profits of energy companies like Total in the wake of the war in Ukraine and the shooting up of fuel prices. The public anger in France was due to the fuel shortage in France because of the strike by refinery workers. The fuel shortage in France is due to the closure of the refineries and not due to lack of oil imports.

Macron appears reluctant to act against the private sector and big business because he seems to believe that France can regain its economic clout only through profit-driven market economy, which will help make France the developed economy it has been over the years, next to Germany.

The unions in France have called for a strike on Tuesday, and it will turn out to be a huge protest week in the country. Said Melenchon, “We are going to have a week the likes of which we don’t see very often. Everything is coming together. We are starting it with this march, which is an immense success. France’s first woman writer Anne Ernaux, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2022 earlier this month, was by the side of Melenchon. A staunch leftist, Ernaux held Macron responsible for the chaos in the country.

It would seem that the left parties in France, especially the Socialists, are trying to hard to retrieve lost ground in the country’s electoral battlefield because in the presidential election in April the faceoff was between Macron and his far-right opponent Marie Le Pen. The left parties had been squeezed out as it were. The economic distress of the people provides the left parties a good opportunity to assert their political clout.

Of course, the more important thing is to look for real solutions to an economy that seems to be caught in a time warp. Macron realises that France has to create Internet systems like Meta of its own, and that indeed is his aim.

France has always resented the fact that it is forced to follow America’s breakthrough technologies. France is fiercely independent and it indeed goes back to Charles De Gaulle, the post-World War Two leader who was aware of the superiority of France. Macron is a modified Gaullist who wants to keep France as a separate European power to reckon with.