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Les Déplorables Demand The Fall Of The Regime
Today we will again (read the comments) see large, and mostly peaceful gilets jaunes gatherings all over France to protest the neo-liberal policies of the Macron regime. The biggest ones will naturally occur in the capital Paris. They are likely to later develop into riots. The regime ordered 89,000 policemen onto the streets to counter any potential violence. 8,000 of them will be in Paris alone.
A problem is that police are often the cause of riots. Dressed like storm troopers and angry after way too many hours on the street they tend to attack with much brutality even when calm defense would be more appropriate.
After last week protest the Macron regime first delayed and then abolished the planned fuel tax hike that was the immediate cause of the yellow vest protests. That was too little too late and made his regime look weak. The people are now demanding more measures like a reintroduction of the wealth tax which Macron had abolished in one of his first acts in power.
Over the last week fireman, ambulance drivers, students and the administrative police union have joined the protests.
Luxury shops have been boarded up, museums and landmarks were closed. (An English language livestream can be watched here. Please point to others in the comments.) The police are an running early interdiction tactic, closing off roads and applying tear gas to kettle the people and to prevent larger gatherings at the Champs-Élysées. Hundreds have already been arrested. Meanwhile the protesters sing la Marseillaise. It is way too early for the police to use such force and it is not going to work. This only increases the anger of the protestors and will cause more conflagrations.
Les déplorables demand the fall of the regime.
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In a France24 report from a small town in the country side shows extraordinary solidarity between the people. Police passing through an occupied toll road entry sign the protesters petition, other pass by and gift food to the middle-aged protestors.
One woman makes an good point. Yes, the violence as seen in Paris last weekend was not nice. But only after last weeks protest went violent were the yellow vests really noted by the media and by the otherwise tone deaf politicians.
If the protestors today try to storm the Bastille, the Elyssée palace or whatever, if there are more casualties, more people will join protests and strikes during the next week. Macron will come under even more pressure. He will have to dismiss his prime minister and government. More pressure and he will have to dissolve the parliament and call for new elections. That would likely mean the end of his policies of further enriching the very rich while impoverishing the lower middle class and the poor.
Another view…more in the line of B´s analysis ( he even calls the 5th Republic a regime..). but which recognize that, as to date, this is a nationalist, far-right wing, white movement…He concludes that the ignition of the spark should be taken advantage by the whole anti-austerity labour movement, and as well better for the elites to pay attention, so as to not leaving the movement to rot under repression, when another unexpected developments could come if the anger is not placated now…
Towards a regime crisis in France…by Rafael Poch, former correspondet in Paris….
In June of 2017, when Macron won the presidential elections, I predicted a regime crisis in France. Since I arrived in that country, in 2014, until my dismissal as a correspondent in Paris a year ago, the impression of flammable matter has never stopped haunting me in anticipation of a spark. Many French observers on the left responded positively to my questions in that direction, but, surely driven by the fear that every intellectual has to be accused of taking their desires for reality, did not go beyond, “Yes, something may happen” .
The protests against the labor laws of Hollande came (Macron was then counselor of the president, then minister of Economy) and the nuit debout the particular civic-youth movement of the Place de la République of Paris that did not fit like French 15-M. Later, with Macron as president, new protests against the labor reform as of autumn 2017. In both cases, the impression was the same: the discontent in France was general, but passive. The people who went out were the same as always; the political left (that is to say what is left of the Socialist Party), militants, some students and high school graduates (which in France are a political factor) and some small unions plus the CGT, the only great union center still not decaffeinated. There was no relationship between discontent and mobilization. And even more important: the most disadvantaged, the urban suburbs, dormitories of the unemployed France and of emigrant origin, were conspicuous by their absence. “Where are the banlieues?” We asked ourselves.
In the presidential victory of Macron things did not add up. There was a sense of precooked product by the powers that be in the shadow, a political fast food more typical of the other side of the Atlantic than of France. A victory that was imposed on the suspicious elimination, via the kompromat of the Penelopegate, the innocent scandal of the woman of the candidate of the traditional right, François Fillon, perhaps too much Gaullist and too little anti-Russian for some (to get right in these matters is always advisable think badly). And Macron’s victory posed so much a crisis of legitimacy – very few people voted him out of conviction, the majority to elude Le Pen and with a record abstention – as a crisis of representativeness: the victory exploded the left / right divide, left out of game to the traditional parties and obtained a dominion of the elites in the National Assembly without precedents and without the minor correspondence with the reality of the French society.
If that was added the personality of the president, a young self-made triumphant technocrat and sponsored by the powers that be – the medium from which the most dangerous reactionaries leave – the cocktail was explosive. But a Molotov cocktail (or “Molokotov”, as a friend’s grandmother used to say when Franco) is something that does not ignite if there is no spark. The yellow vests are the spark.
Now on the street new faces are seen. It is not the political left, it is the normal people, the majority harmed by the macronía and offended by the impertinent verbal incontinence of this “president of the rich”. People who are beyond politics, who do not vote, or who vote for the National Front, or the France Insoumise. A social revolt of those from below, of the majority France that has seen its life deteriorate in the last 20 or 30 years, but … mostly white.
Peripheral neighborhoods of migrant origin are still absent. If that changes, if the fire caused by this spark finally catches on the banlieues, then yes we will be in the wake of the great French social insurrections that have provided so much oxygen to freedom and social progress in Europe since 1789.
You have to be very attentive to France. The claims have been expanding. In their last expression they offer a fairly complete catalog of a radical rejection of austerity, privatization and growing social inequality. Politicians complain that it is very difficult to negotiate with this (and there is the grace and force of the matter):
– More fiscal justice.
– Minimum wage of 1300 euros net.
– Favor the small commerce of towns and urban centers, cease the construction of large shopping centers around the big cities that kill small businesses.
– More free parking in the city centers.
– A plan to isolate homes to make ecology by saving the domestic economies.
– More taxes for large companies.
– Same social security system for all.
– No to the pension reform. No pension below 1,200 euros.
– Salaries indexed to inflation.
– Maximum salary of 15,000 euros.
– Protect the national industry. No to relocations.
– Limit temporary contracts.
– Industrial promotion of the hydrogen car (more ecological than electric).
– End of the austerity policy. Cessation of payment of illegitimate interest on the debt and combating tax fraud.
– That the asylum seekers be well treated and that action be taken against the causes of forced emigration.
– Limitation of rental prices.
– Prohibition of the sale of goods of the nation (dams, airports ….).
– 25 students per class maximum.
– Favor the rail transport of goods.
– Price maritime fuel and kerosene.
Of course many things are missing. As the French media complex is reacting to this crisis, it will soon appear some fundamental claim to democratize and demonopolize media that today are 80% in the hands of large corporations and billionaires logically hostile to the interests of the social majority .
But, if this is negotiated, or something like this, we can throw the curtain on the policy of European austerity: the sum of a standing France, plus a United Kingdom outside the EU, plus the end of the merkelato, will leave the austeritarian agenda of the German right out of combat in the EU.
If, on the other hand, it is not negotiated and opted for repression, or for letting the movement rot, it will be necessary to see what the social reaction is, and, in any case, other future sparks will not have been remedied, since the presence of Flammable matter is no longer a hypothesis, but an established fact. In any case, the entire regime of the Fifth Republic could be subject to serious proof. You have to be very attentive to France, because the change in the EU depends on it.
Posted by: Sasha | Dec 8 2018 21:20 utc | 74
Many people don’t understand the French, particularly those from the Anglo-Saxon world.
We expect the French to be exactly like ourselves, and, I suppose, the French are the same when they express exasperation at the Anglo-Saxon.
What makes the French inherently different, in attitude and outlook, is that they are the descendants of a successful working class revolution. I know that this has been rolled back to a large extent but the outlook, of equality (not of “opportunity” but actual “equality”) remains.
The language is different as well. English with its deferential, constant use of “sorry”, “please”, “thank-you”, and “sir” is anathema to the French. The French language is more structured towards equality and is decidedly, non-deferential. This is why the English perceive the French as rude and the French perceive the English-speaker as, well, cowed, insincerely “inferior” and aggravatingly indirect. Language moulds the people who speak it, more so than the people mould their language. As an English-speaker I can see that the language I use makes me adopt a deferential (class-based) posture.
There will be many different kinds of actor on the gilets jaunes protests, including agent provocateurs, state-actors, revolutionaries, anarchists, but these will have little effect on how the protest develop. (Such actors are always present and do not have the power to escalate or de-escalate protest, but do have the power to act at crucial moments – that is, they can act in certain “circumstances”, but cannot create such “circumstances” and cannot control the outcome of their acts). However, you may, if you wish, fume at these “malign actors” if the protests take a direction that is not to your pleasing.
These protests are somehow not as worthwhile as the May 1968 “revolution”? In fact the May 1968 protests were decidedly lacking in need and direction and had only one substantive objective; the overthrow of de Gualle. The May 1968 protests were largely centered around Paris and were not supported by the vast majority of the population. It is much more likely that Pompidou and the French establishment used the protests as a way of getting rid of de Gaulle rather than the protests being directly responsible for that outcome.
Fast-forward 60 years and we see a protest that is much more widespread, enjoys a huge majority of public support and is motivated by real deprivation. That is why Cohn-Bendit is frightened of the gilet jaunes, it is too real, too “sans-coulottes”.
Listen, communist! Marxist! left-winger! however you style yourself – it is not your role to poke holes in a worker’s movement. Your role is on the street with the “gilets jaunes”, leading, if your views are so correct, but not disparaging and running down those who have actually gotten off the sofa and decided that enough-is-enough.
The media described the Yankovych Government of Ukraine as a “regime” even though it was the outcome of a democratic election. The media describes the democratically elected government of Venezuela as a “regime”. Now the language comes back to be used against Macron and there are objections? Macron was democratically elected but only as the result of quite staggering manipulations. (I have gone into this previously so I won’t repeat myself other than to say that Macron would not have won against any other candidate other than Le Pen and to achieve this, quite extraordinary efforts where made to ensure that Le Pen was the candidate Macron faced).
So we (in the West) use the language of “regime” against other democracies yet somehow it is not acceptable when such language is used against a western government? We destabilise other Nations without a thought that this will have an effect on the West? We think that we can provoke conflicts, cause wars, mobilise troops, along the outskirts of Europe (i.e. in North Africa, Middle East, Eastern & Central Europe, borders of Russia) and somehow think that this will have no effect on Europe? That it is actually a question of morality that such things could not happen in Europe??? We imagine that resources can be squeezed from the European worker and they will be too supine to revolt?
We are creating the conditions for a huge catacyclism that will sweep Europe, as we know it, away. But don’t worry it’s all the fault of the burly guy in the photo, y’know, the one with the bandage, who on earth could he be?
Posted by: ADKC | Dec 8 2018 23:32 utc | 87
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