It’s rare for politicians to deliver on campaign promises. But French president Emmanuel Macron did. He promised a revolution, and got one. Unfortunately for Macron, the revolt is against his own policies.
Bloomberg comments on France’s Dangerous Yellow Vest Protesters.
The “Yellow Vests” protests now challenging President Emmanuel Macron have exposed a widening hole in the center of French politics—created by Macron himself.
It was Macron whose election in May 2017 all but obliterated the two establishment parties that had run France for 30 years. His own political movement had been launched less than a year before and his closest opponent for the presidency was from the far-right. By positioning himself as a reformer, Macron, 40, had hoped to establish a centrist consensus.
“The ‘gilets jaunes’ movement will probably peter out, but not the anger, which is likely to go on and take new forms maybe more dangerous for Macron,” said Jim Shields, a professor of French politics at Warwick University in the U.K. “It’s hard to see how he can complete controversial reforms like pensions and unemployment insurance without yet more blood on the pavement.”
A protest Saturday in Paris exploded into violence that left over 100 injured and more than 400 arrested, as well as burned cars and looted stores in the heart of the capital. Named after the colored vests motorists must keep in their cars for emergencies, the campaign began as a protest against higher gasoline taxes to reduce emissions. It’s now expanded to other demands and has the support of three-quarters of the French public, polls show.
“We are talking about cost of living and Macron is talking ecology,” said Joffre Denis, a 33-year old fireman who had come 125 miles from his home in the north of France to Paris, wearing a yellow vest at Saturday’s protest. “His solution for people who can’t afford food by the end of the month is to buy solar panels and electric cars.”
Revolt Against Taxes
The Yellow Vest movement started as a protest against a new diesel tax by Macron, but has now spread to other ideas and taxes in general. This is why:
And what is France delivering for that tax rate? Obviously, not enough.
Radicalized Voters
Macron’s “En Marche” (Forward, Onward, On the Move) party promised reform. Macron delivered higher taxes. At least 75% of the French voters have turned on him.
They will turn away from the center to the far right or far left.
Most Yellow Vests supporters will split their votes between Le Pen’s National Rally and Jean-Luc Melenchon’s far-left France Unbowed, Boulouque said. Together, they received 41 percent of the vote in the first round of presidential voting in 2017.
Emergency Meeting Called
While France was burning, Macron was at the useless G-20 summit. When he returned he held an Emergency Meeting with his advisers.
French President Emmanuel Macron has held an urgent security meeting following a day of riots by thousands of anti-government protesters.
Ministers said that while no options had been ruled out, imposing a state of emergency had not been discussed during the talks – despite earlier reports.
France’s interior ministry says about 136,000 people took part in the protests nationwide.
The protest movement has no identifiable leadership and has gained momentum via social media, encompassing a whole range of participants from the anarchist far left to the nationalist far right, and plenty of moderates in between.
Nearly 300,000 people took part in the first country-wide demonstration, on 17 November.
France Burning
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6Tdqm-xwoE
Required Clothes
The “gilets jaunes” protesters, so-called because they have taken to the streets wearing the high-visibility yellow clothing that is required to be carried in every vehicle by French law.
Requiring people to own a symbol of protests, what a hoot.
Musical Tribute
I am certain readers would like a fitting musical tribute to these events. I can oblige.
You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
“The French need their version of Thatcherism…it ain’t gonna happen. They are essentially rebelling against their own culture. If you try austerity, the Left will riot. If you raid the piggybanks the middle-class will riot.”
Brilliant analysis by cocao
Disadvantaged people need more opportunities. If businesses and factories shutdown, those opportunities decline. Add in refugees and an imported culture of 7 child families, two generations away from any hope of a professional education and you get the classic French ghetto. Hooray for humanitarianism, where love and disciplined compassion must eventually trump starvation and poverty, particularly amongst the least educated.
“The French are violently opposed to socialism if they have to pay for it.”
that’s the comment of the day from SuperDuper
Thanks Mish!!!! 😎
Macron is completely out of touch and in a la-la-la-land.
It is totally insane for Macron to put huge hikes on diesel, gas and energy taxes to “save the planet” and “fight global warming” while the totally inept and incompetently negotiated Paris agreement on Climate Change gives China freedom to raise their CO2 emissions as high as they want until 2030 and since China’s “cut” in CO2 is to keep CO2 emissions at the 2030 level from then on that means the Paris agreement actually INCENTIVIZES China to massively increase their CO2 emissions by 2030.
And this while China already NOW causes more CO2 emissions than USA and EU COMBINED!
The fact that European media is cheering the Paris agreement as some victory is a failure in every European media company.
Has Macron even READ the Paris agreement himself to see how stupid it is?
If the IPCC projections and assumptions and forecasts about climate change are correct then the Paris agreement is NOT saving the Earth instead the Paris agreement could be more fittingly called a Global suicide pact.
EU has thousands of bureaucrats taking TAX FREE salaries working on Climate Change to make sure living costs as much as possible and European factories are uncompetitive so they are closed as quickly as possible and Macron and other European politicians live in some fever dream how they can cut CO2 massively and by some magic people will not live in poverty due the ideas these bureaucrats come up with with most being tax-tax-tax.
The need to raise taxes in EU is also the by-product of well paying factory jobs moving to China which boosts the Chinese CO2 emissions further and EU bureaucrats they can plug the hole in the tax base by increasing diesel, gas and energy taxes on population that is losing well paying jobs.
Add to that the massive numbers of permanently unemployed migrants France has brought from France’s former African colonies and it means taxes need to be hiked quickly to pay welfare so migrant ghettos surrounding every large French city do not go up in flames.
Well now regular French people had enough.
Macron has never worked a day in a real job, he is the elitist of elite and studied in elite schools and got jobs because he was so “brilliant”and had everything on a golden plate in life.
Maybe next Macron will tell French people to eat cake…
Wonderfully explained the Macron phenomenon. A deplorable case for France and also for the EU with all the frenchmen like him, who are destroying it. Macron far from blending in as an ordinary frenchman among frenchmen, he himself is always so arrogant and so petulant, unable to understand people who cannot afford food, he is totally out of touch. He will end up as Marie Antoniette.
The French are violently opposed to socialism if they have to pay for it.
I will reiterate my previous statement, because what’s going on is certainly more complex than simple opposition to socialism. Confusing populism or backlash with socialism is the easy (dare I say libertarian) view of why unrest is boiling over. I think the more accurate description of events is the realization of the French citizenry that they were/are being sacrificed at the altar of crony capitalism and the socialized losses that normally follow the destructive neoliberal policies which redistribute income towards the top. Similar to what’s happening in the U.S., the government is taking sides, enriching the few at the expense of the many.
There is only one way to decrease petroleum consumption, and that is to raise the cost of it. People wont agree to that, and so petroleum consumption will continue.
Increasing the tax on cars is another option.
People are all fired up to make other people do something about Climate Change. Ask them to burn a little less oil and this is The the result. Ponder that next time you’re sitting at the gas station.
Think we should send over a State Dept rep & a Senator or so to hand out cookies. Maybe even arm the most violent protesters, get them to shoot protesters & police, blame it on Macron, watch him flee for his life. I don’t really believe that, but not far-fetched & highlights the absurdity of recent US foreign policy.
This is OT but related in a way. In Spain socialist stronghold Andalucia has fallen to the right in today’s regional election. It has been socialist for 36 yrs, since the dictatorship I think. This was an attempt to sure up support by early election that failed.
Spanish socialist PM Pedro Sanchez is INCOMPETENT.
He went as far as to say the high fencing topped with barbed wire surrounding Spanish enclaves in Africa called Ceuta and Melilla should be removed.
After this virtue signaling stupidity much more Africans have rushed those enclaves and climbed the fences topped with barbed wire since they correctly interpreted Sanchez to be soft touch loon.
Also previously if migrants climbed the fences Spanish authorities just opened a door in the fence and pushed them back to Africa but under Sanchez they have allowed them to stay in the enclaves and since so many have come they have now started transporting them to Spanish mainland which quite predictably has led to more and more Africans trying to come.
Sanchez also increased sea patrols so coming to Spain by boat from Morocco (it is usually not Moroccans but other Africans just going through Morocco)got easier since under Sanchez Spanish government boats pick people up closer to Africa to “avoid drownings” and Sanchez also CANCELLED previous Spanish policy of keeping asylum seekers in CLOSED asylum seeker centers as allowed by EU directives and Sanchez cut detention to a minimum for failed asylum seekers so if one gets to Spain now they can get drunk in the cities streets straight away and they have even been put up into hotels and student accommodations since so many have been coming under Sanchez.
Also under Sanchez registering the asylum seekers by taking their fingerprints is NOT done in all cases because if the migrants refuse to give fingerprints then they are not taken.
Previously Spain registered everyone thereby stopping onward movement.
This has led to huge rushes of Africans to Spain and many are continuing to north since they know that if their fingerprints were NOT taken they can go to Germany to seek asylum or disappear in France’s migrant ghettos if they are those nationalities that most likely do NOT get asylum.
France was forced to order lots of French border police on the border with Spain to try to stop this and in addition to turning migrants back at the Italy-France border French border police are now trying to do this also in the Spain-France border and send them back to Spain.
Spain has had more migrants in 2018 than Greece and Italy combined.
Sanchez is even more INCOMPETENT than Macron.
Not at Merkel level of incompetence yet but getting really close.
Tax table OECD via Bloomberg – re-loaded the image
This new fuel tax is due to the Paris “Agreement”. I’m glad to see such a glow public support.
What is the source of the tax table?
Socialist leaders generally are detached from economic reality. They detach their followers with the promise of security and free stuff, while they destroy the industry the makes prosperity possible. We the excrement finally hits the oscillator the people are so indoctrinated that they can’t see what went wrong, and just want their st
The new socialists always think themselves smarter than the old socialists and will make it work this time.
And besides, they certainly think themselves smarter than the average citizen and certainly know what is best for them.
While your distaste of socialism is appreciated, let’s not fool ourselves into confusing what is actually happening. This is not true socialism; It’s predatory capitalism combined with socialized losses, thus the backlash. The same thing is happening in most developed economies and particularly here in the U.S.
Macron cannot relate to ordinary people because he has never been one. Just look at his work experience.
He hasn’t held any of those positions long enough to experience a whole cycle or achieve much at all. Moving on just in time.
Too shallow & too inexperienced & doesn’t even know what it is to have children and probably never will.
Next?
The NAZIs were bad socialists because they focused their murder on a particular ethnic group, as opposed to good socialists that, when pushed hard enough, kill indiscriminately.
It is finally dawning on people that they have been getting poorer for a couple of decades and the future is looking dim. This is just the beginning.
People vote for socialism and then are upset when they get socialism.
Repeated in Illinois, Connecticut, New Jersey, NYS, California, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Newark, Camden, Buffalo, etc., etc., etc.
I would say there are some common denominators – but then I would be called a Nazi (which is, ironically, slang for the National Socialist Workers Party).
We must destroy the West to save it! Tax industry until there is none. Tax fuel until no one can afford it. They are dirty things for lesser beings. We of the Elite are above such things. All the peasants believe that there is something for nothing and the government is obligated to take care of them. Boy, do we elite scum have them buffaloed.
France is less than a decade away from famine. Another worker’s paradise going awry.
The French elected as their President a globalist stooge who is married to a pedophile old enough to be his mother, and they are not happy with the result. Shocking!