In 1958, at the prodding of Charles de Gaulle, the France's 5th Republic was established. (It could be argued that it was a coup)
It established what can be best described as an, "Elected Dictatorship," because de Gaulle despaired of French parliamentary politics, or as he put it, "How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?"
Generally, France's President has used this power with restraint, but after Macron invoked pension cut-backs by decree after it was clear that the National Assembly and Senate would not approve the bill, the country has erupted in protest:
It’d been hanging over France’s retirement reform fight from the beginning — a reminder that, come hell or high water, President Emmanuel Macron intended to have his way.
Last Thursday, Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne announced that Macron’s government would “commit its responsibility” (the terse wording for decree in the French constitution’s Article 49, Section 3) to force adoption of a hike in the retirement age from sixty-two to sixty-four. Promptly filed on Friday, two motions of no confidence in response — the only way to reverse a so-called 49.3 —were struck down in the National Assembly on March 20. Enough MPs from the center-right Republicans, ostensibly an opposition party, opted to prop up Macron’s minority government.
Macron’s pension bill is now set to become law, barring a few scenarios like an appeal to the Constitutional Council and a possible referendum initiative to revoke the package. The government’s reform was officially about covering a budgeting hole and calming the supposedly wary financial markets, as Macron is said to have warned in the cabinet meeting last Thursday when the decision to force the legislation was finally made.
Unofficially, pulling off retirement reform had morphed into an obsession for the president, who came to view it as a silver bullet for reaffirming his authority at the start of his second term. The irony now is that Macron has fired the first shot in a political crisis that has left him increasingly isolated.
The 49.3 is one of the most brazen acts of executive privilege allowed by France’s top-heavy Fifth Republic — the political system established by Charles de Gaulle after he maneuvered back to power following a 1958 right-wing putsch. While in last June’s parliamentary elections Macron’s supporters remained the single largest bloc, they lost their majority of seats; already before last week’s pension decision, Borne had used this power to override parliament ten times before, on a string of budgeting bills.
But falling back on the 49.3 for a sensitive issue like pension reform means igniting a political powder keg. The president’s single-minded quest to force his desired reform — one rejected by an alliance of the country’s unions and whose economic justification has been criticized by the state’s own pension advisory body — is dangerously straining France’s governing institutions, astonishing the opposition and even some of the president’s allies.
Millions of people have taken to the street since mid-January, when the legislation was formally introduced and placed on a fast-track pathway to rush to adoption in fifty days. If it was not enough to bring the government to reconsider its package, the wave of strikes and protests has at least forced Macron into the embarrassing position of strong-arming his signature reform. It could end up turning into a Pyrrhic victory for the president.
And a powder keg it is.
Pretty much the entire country is on a general strike, with (and this is the first time that I have ever heard of this) staff of the Louvre Museum blockading entrances in protest, in addition to road blockages, strikes by garbage collectors in Paris, transportation workers, refinery workers, students, teachers.
Basically it's pretty much everyone but the brutal and confrontational French riot police.
The right wing in the Parliament rallied to Macron's support, at least to the degree that Macron survived a no-confidence vote, but his actions, and particularly the unilateral nature of those actions, has led to protests unlike anything in my memory.
It's gotten dicey enough that a state visit by King Charles of the UK had to be postponed.
Certainly the optics, a state dinner at Versailles invokes Maria Antoinette's apocryphal, "Let them eat cake," quote, were absolutely atrocious.
In the, "This sh$# is getting real," department we had protesters setting fire to the Bordeaux city hall, which is rather more aggressive than the usual vandalism from the small number of assholes at French protests, who normally content themselves with smashing the windows of McDonald's Restaurants and the like.
As it stands, the French state security apparatus appears to continue to (brutally) support the regime, albeit with the condemnation of the Council of Europe's Human Rights Commissioner.
I do not know if the French 5th Republic will survive this, but I hope not. It is a truly awful way to govern a society.
