Macron has failed to lift France's gloom

As a cold dusk fell on police slugging it out with violent high-vis-jacketed demonstrators on Place de la République in Paris last Thursday, there was a distinct feeling of déjà-vu.

The "populist" gilets jaunes, according to analysts, were meant to have nothing to do with public sector and "protected" employees who were protesting against the end of their cosy pension deals. Last week's nationwide strike, France's largest for years, was supposedly all about traditional unions flexing their muscle at last. What did the gilets jaunes have to do with it?

On paper, there's a simple logic to it. French citizens mostly get their pensions from the state, from contributions levied on salaries. The pay-as-you-go system worked for a long time: in 1946, when it was created, there were eight active workers to pay for one retiree. But demographics, longer life expectancies and structural unemployment have inexorably shrunk the pot: by 2040, that unsustainable figure falls to 1.5.

Emmanuel Macron's government, picking up the pieces from its predecessors' climb-downs, and wary of a frontal attack like Alain Juppé's in 1995, which ended up in a month-long general strike followed by complete capitulation, floated a number of ideas to fix the system in what it hoped was a conciliatory manner. Instead, it was seen as an admission of weakness.

Macron wants to raise the pension age (lowered from 65 to 60 by François Mitterrand in 1981, and only modestly raised to 62 a decade ago by Nicolas Sarkozy). He wants to remove a maze of perks and "special statutes", ranging from lower pension ages (50 for train drivers) to unbalanced calculations for annuities (based on salary in the last six months for civil servants, while private sector workers' pensions are based on the last 25 years).

There are 40 systèmes spéciaux for pensions, covering 15 per cent of the workforce, ranging from opera stagehands to sailors (the oldest, created under Louis XIV in 1673) to miners, utilities employees, Métro drivers, actors and many more. This is referred to in public discourse as privilèges, a weighted word redolent with Robespierrian accents, and ought to have been a red flag to the decidedly un-privileged gilets jaunes.

Instead, the newly revived opposition has achieved the holy grail known to paleo-Marxists as La convergence des luttes (convergence of the struggles). Sixty per cent of the French support the national strike. The gilets jaunes, often given to conspiracy theories and to voting for Marine Le Pen, confabbed with CGT union organisers in advance of last week's marches.

Macron's magic is gone

All their concerns relate to the same pessimistic, declinist view of a deeply unequal France where jobs vanish, life is more expensive and public services long taken for granted, from good, uncrowded hospitals to small railway branch lines, have disappeared. Add to this the very French distrust of change, found at every level of society, and you see a nation that's been in a state of mild depression for decades; unable to look at the facts.

You can call the uprising populist; but each European nation, like Tolstoy's unhappy families, does populism it its own way, and what the French hark back for is the lost post-war era of Les Trente Glorieuses, the 30 years of fast growth, full employment and a cosseting state run by a competent cadre of selfless civil servants intent on rebuilding the country.

It was killed off by the 1974 oil crunch, and ever since unions and politicians, left and right, have been calling for its return, flying in the face of reality. (Even Marine Le Pen asks for more state benefits, not less, and doesn't say how she will fund them.)

Macron, a top civil servant who only ventured into banking for a couple of years, was mistaken for a revolutionary by voters two-and-a-half years ago. He was younger, he sounded different, he infuriated left and right alike; they thought he was a 2.0 populist.

He is right that the French economy is doing better: unemployment has fallen, growth is above EU average, investment is cautiously rising. France, in fact, is one of the most redistributive nations in the world, even more than Sweden. But his moment has passed: to a country that collectively wants to take a holiday from reality, he now sounds like the technocrat he is. His magic is gone, and he might as well brace himself for a bitter December.

The Telegraph London