Macron’s Gamble

“We need to work more,” French President Emmanuel Macron said in his New Year’s Eve address to the country, “to pass on to our children a fair and durable social model.”

Within days of his address, Macron was introducing legislation in the National Assembly to raise the retirement age from sixty-two to sixty-four, a centerpiece of his reelection campaign and a long-sought-after goal of his presidency.

Macron ran for president as a young, non-ideological pragmatist who would dislodge France from its political and economic stasis, but his presidency has been yet another joyless experiment in autocratic neoliberalism. A self-styled moderate, Macron has proven adept at occupying the space left vacant between the country’s moribund center-left and center-right parties. Meanwhile, the Far Left and Far Right remain too fractious to mount any significant challenge to his agenda.

His reform of France’s pension system is only the most recent example. Macron insists that the age hike is necessary to preserve France’s pension system, widely celebrated as “solidarity between the generations.” As with the U.S. social-security system, workers contribute payroll taxes, and retirees withdraw their pensions. Overwhelmingly popular, the French public pension system is considered a cornerstone of France’s social contract and an essential part of its national identity.

But even its staunchest defenders acknowledge that the system will soon run a deficit as France’s population ages and the ratio of workers to retirees decreases. Without changes, the country projects only 1.2 taxpaying workers to support each retiree in 2070, down from 1.7 in 2020. Similar challenges are vexing the rest of Western Europe and the United States. Further complicating the arithmetic are two factors: France’s qualifying age for a state pension is the lowest among Europe’s leading economies, while the amount it spends to support the system (nearly 14 percent of its GDP) is the third highest in Europe, behind only Italy and Greece.

Opponents argue that companies and the wealthy should pitch in more to finance the pension system. Spain’s left-wing government recently announced a deal with the country’s labor unions to do just this.

Macron opted for a different approach, pushing for the age increase to secure an additional 17 billion euros for the fund within the next five years, which he says will free the state to invest in defense, green energy, schools, and technology.

To ensure his victory, he invoked article 48.3 of the French Constitution, ramming the legislation through without an official vote when he didn’t have enough support in the National Assembly. This maneuver, while legal, sparked a series of mass protests and disruptions throughout the country and prompted a no-confidence motion against his government.

The motion failed and the law passed, but the public outrage has not waned. Macron is now facing the same type of anti-government protests the Yellow Vest movement employed during his first term. Similar protests forced Jacques Chirac to reverse a similar 1995 law raising the retirement age, though Nicolas Sarkozy was able to withstand weeks of protest fifteen years later to raise it from sixty to the current sixty-two.

After days of silence, Macron finally spoke publicly about his presidential diktat and the ensuing public unrest. “The mob, whatever it is, has no legitimacy.”

But he still seems confident that these protests will eventually die down, just as they did when Sarkozy was in office. In his hauteur, Macron is acting like a French head of state from an earlier era, recalling both de Gaulle and Louis XIV.

L’état, c’est lui. Get over it.

—March 23, 2023