France is paralyzed. Since a general strike began on Thursday, planes have been grounded, mail delivery stopped and schools closed, and trains remain in their depots. Even lawyers are staying home. Some 800,000 people took to the street across the country last Thursday, and another major demonstration is planned for today as the strike continues. As one participant put it to the French newspaper Mediapart, the mass mobilizations are meant as a rebuke to “Macron and his world.”
The uprising is in response to President Emmanuel Macron’s proposal to drastically reform France’s pension system. It’s not the first major labor action of Mr. Macron’s presidency: Similar mobilizations followed his plan to revise labor protections in late 2017, as well as his cuts to the national rail service and overhaul of university admissions last spring. But this looks to be the largest. Will it decisively change France’s political landscape?
With such a broad turnout, the labor movement believes it may achieve a repeat of the general strike of 1995, which shut down the country for weeks and forced President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Alain Juppé to abandon a similar pension reform. Union leaders hope that the threat of an economic standstill lasting through the Christmas holidays will give the government no choice but to capitulate and at the same time seriously weaken Mr. Macron’s credibility through the remainder of his presidency.
Mr. Macron — who has long thought himself uniquely capable of succeeding where his predecessors failed — is hoping to weather the storm once again. Despite the frequency of strikes and protests throughout his time in office, opposition parties have failed to convert this anger into a serious political challenge. After the dust has cleared each time, the most likely outcome in the next nationwide elections in 2022 will once again be a choice between Mr. Macron and his technocratic center-right agenda and the far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who is even less popular. Mr. Macron may not be able to avoid being loathed by a large portion of the French public, but if he can outlast the strikers, he may well remain the most palatable option in a field of weak political opposition.
Short of an outright victory in the streets, then, Mr. Macron’s opponents will have to use this strike to create a political alternative to the binary choice between Mr. Macron’s market austerity and Ms. Le Pen’s xenophobic neo-fascism.
This will require grappling with the enigmatic Yellow Vests, who emerged just over a year ago to protest economic inequality and the burdensome cost of living. For most of the past year, these protesters have largely remained distinct from organized labor and political parties. The Yellow Vests refused familiar tactics of French protest movements, preferring to occupy rural traffic circles rather than march down symbolic Parisian boulevards. Drawing on the rural and suburban middle and working classes, the protests brought new people into political action, some of whom were quickly radicalized in the face of police repression.
The Yellow Vest movement succeeded where the labor movement and the left opposition so far have failed: in securing concessions from Mr. Macron and Prime Minister Édouard Philippe, who agreed last year to scrap the tax on fuel that initially prompted the protests and to spend billions of euros to try to increase ordinary households’ purchasing power.
But the movement, which is deeply committed to direct democracy, has been unable to translate mass anger into concrete political opposition, rejecting all attempts by politicians, labor leaders or any other institutions to represent them. When a young protester named Ingrid Levavasseur tried to form a Yellow Vest party for the European elections earlier this year, she gave up the effort after being assaulted on the street by fellow vest-clad demonstrators.
Following the union-led demonstrations last Thursday, the Yellow Vests came out this weekend in full force, leading some on the French left to believe that the two movements will finally unite to defeat Mr. Macron. The past two years, however, have demonstrated that there’s no easy way for the president’s opponents to translate these movement into an electoral challenge.
Still, some novel political coalitions may hold promise: François Ruffin — a member of the left-wing party La France Insoumise, or France Unbowed, with an independent streak and working-class credentials — is hoping to build an “eco-populist alliance,” uniting urban green voters with disaffected inhabitants of deindustrialized France. Such initiatives, like Mr. Ruffin himself, are relatively untested. But since coalition politics is generally more viable at the local level in France and Mr. Macron’s La République en Marche party has few footholds in city government, municipal elections in March may be an opportunity to try out such an innovative coalition between leftists and greens. Such a strategy may even spell a comeback for Paris’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo, a member of France’s struggling Socialist Party once thought to be on her way out but who is now leading Mr. Macron’s preferred candidate after gaining support from some members of the Green Party.
Like the Yellow Vest protests, the strike has revealed a broad rejection of “Macron’s world” and a willingness of ordinary people to enter the political arena to oppose it. If the French left has any chance of building on the strike’s momentum, it will have to pose an alternative vision of the world. This will mean not only calling to preserve social protections but also coming up with a new message of what these protections will look like in an environmentally sustainable future. It will mean not only standing at the head of demonstrations with union leaders but also speaking directly to ordinary people at the back of the line who have long been turned off by politics. As it stands today, the left is politically weak at the national level, but it has an opportunity to begin building a new coalition.
It is worth remembering that even after his own defeat during the 1995 strikes, Mr. Chirac overwhelmingly won re-election in a 2002 contest against Ms. Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie. Whether or not the strikes can force concessions from the government, Mr. Macron’s opponents will have to keep the focus on an alternative vision to improve ordinary people’s economic well-being. Mr. Macron will hope to move past the strike and focus the national debate on issues of immigration, culture and national identity, where he believes he can highlight contrasts between himself and Ms. Le Pen. If the French left fails to start a new political conversation, offering a viable alternative to the center and the far right, even a defeated Mr. Macron may well coast on to re-election.
Jacob Hamburger writes on French politics and is an editor at Tocqueville 21, a blog on contemporary democracy.