And so France continues to smoulder. Two weeks after the first mass demonstrations in support of increased funding for French state schools, events reached a peak on Saturday October 17. Widespread destruction of small businesses, cafés, town halls and chain shops have brought the French economy even further to catastrophe.
The scenes of mass looting, along with the burning spire of the 150-year-old Limoges town hall hardly inspire confidence in the government of President Emmanuel Macron and his prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu. A sell-off of government bonds is the latest sign of economic gloom, demonstrating the market’s concerns over France’s ability to claw back control over its public finances.
It is easy to forget there is a legitimate reason for these protests: educational reform. This was also the root cause for the events of May and June 1968, which this generation of protesters have looked to emulate. Although changes to the education system were introduced in the wake of May 1968, the centre-right went onto win a majority in the June parliamentary elections in a wave of support for General Charles de Gaulle, rather than in support of the protesters’ cause.
Macron now faces similar problems to de Gaulle, with the cost of living and youth unemployment also part of the picture. When he came to power in May 2017, Macron promised major investment in education and skills. But a report by the French Cour des Comptes, an independent court which monitors public spending, concluded that this investment has had no major impact on improving access to work.
The demonstrators are rightly concerned about the cost of living and the absence of meaningful investment in schools on the margins of major cities. The irony, of course, is that the destruction of businesses in the latest, violent, demonstrations, will probably push the cost of living up, not down.
The impact on tourism, for example, will be considerable, given that some other countries, while stopping short of an outright travel ban, have warned people to exercise caution when travelling to France.
Economy in peril
In 2018, in the wake of the gilets jaunes protests, Macron reversed his previous position of balancing tax cuts with spending cuts and introduced €10 billion (£8.85 billion) worth of measures designed to mitigate the cost of living, including raising the minimum wage and removing tax on overtime payments.
Macron’s disastrous decision to call the summer 2024 parliamentary elections has caused political stalemate in the National Assembly. And, with debt of at least 115% of GDP and a deficit of 5.1% of GDP, the French economy is already deeply burdened. So Macron can ill afford to spend his way out of trouble. To make matters worse, more than 50% of French debt is held by foreign investors – and a bond sell-off is already underway following the weekend’s protests.
What, then, can Macron and Lecornu actually achieve? There is little way out of this financial black hole without tax rises and major cuts to welfare. Clearly a tougher conversation on the French public finances, especially in terms of the very generous retirement packages enjoyed by many over-60s in France, is required.
What this means for the 2027 election
All the while Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the candidates of extreme-right and extreme-left, are already campaigning ahead of the presidential election in April 2027. Macron is essentially a lame duck. He cannot stand for a further term and, in any case, would have little to no chance of winning.
But this episode won’t have helped his fragile centrist coalition. And the recent imposition of a curfew by Lecornu and the unpopular interior minister Laurent Nuñez is unlikely to endear the government to voters concerned by recent violence.
Le Pen’s party, Rassemblement National (RN), has long campaigned on the theme of law and order and she has sought to use the riots to cement her position as the only leader capable of restoring peace to the streets. Le Pen released a video message in which she sat in front of the French national flag, le drapeau tricolore, and promised that the people of France would have their chance to vote for a new era of “restored authority and security”.
By contrast, Mélenchon and his party, La France Insoumise (LFI or France Unbowed) have identified with the protests since they began. The risk is that, while being seen to sympathise with the very real concerns of the protest movement, the LFI and its leader risk being implicated in the violence playing out on news bulletins across the country and globally. Whether this will convince floating voters to back him at the 2027 presidential elections remains unclear.
The choice now appears to be between two extremes rather than the centre ground, given the collapse of the centre-right Republican party and the centre-left Socialist party following Macron’s 2017 victory.
The leading centrist candidates, Gabriel Attal and Edouard Philippe, both former prime ministers under Macron, have plummeted in the polls in recent days and their Ensemble coalition, at 15% Of the vote is a distant third compared with Mélenchon’s leftwing Nouveau Front populaire, on 24%, and Le Pen’s RN, on 34%.
For both centrist candidates the protests are likely to serve as a reminder to maintain distance from the dying Macron administration. They will also be hoping that the economic picture improves before next May, when the French people go to the polls.
David Lees does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.