Editor’s note: This guest commentary was written by Charles R. Hankla, an associate professor of political science at Georgia State University who received his doctorate in 2005 from Emory University and holds degrees from Georgetown University and the London School of Economics. The piece is set to appear as a Farsi translation in an Iranian magazine but is published in English exclusively in Global Atlanta.
Since November, France has been roiled by groups of protestors known for their distinctive attire – the gilet jaune or yellow vest. French law requires all motorists to keep such a vest on hand, and donning one by the side of the road signals an emergency and attracts the attention of passers-by.
For this reason, the yellow vest is both a practical and an appropriate emblem for the protesters. The vest is practical because it is readily available and easily accessible. It is appropriate because a tax on motor fuel sparked the movement, which participants hope will call attention to an emergency in French political life.
Unlike past political movements in France, however, the yellow vests have no clear leaders or even a common ideology, unless that ideology is disgust with “the system.” Indeed, the yellow vest protests, like their predecessors in the Arab Spring, are in some ways very modern, organized and planned largely online.
Background on the Issue
The government of President Emmanuel Macron adopted the offending fuel tax as part of an effort to combat climate change and to reduce driving. This measure, seemingly innocuous and even progressive on its surface, touched a nerve in rural and suburban areas.
Residents outside France’s major cities have long felt marginalized by the metropolitan establishment, and this tax seemed to confirm that their leaders understood nothing about their lives. In Paris and other big cities, public transit makes a car superfluous, but driving is a necessity for those in more sparsely populated places. The cost of gasoline is already extremely high in France, and raising it further convinced many that Macron was truly a “president for the rich.”
Still, we probably wouldn’t be seeing protests of this scale if they were only about a new tax. After all, Macron rescinded the levy in December, just a couple of weeks after the protests started, and has since delivered additional concessions. For example, the French government has promised a cut in the income tax for workers, the indexation of pensions to inflation, and, interestingly, the closing of the elite Ecole nationale d’administration (ENA). And despite that, we are now witnessing the 26th straight week of yellow vests in the street.
Explaining the Anger
What, then, is really driving the anger being channeled by the yellow vests? How can we explain the durability of these protests?
I believe we are seeing the confluence of several issues that have been afflicting the French political and economic systems for some time.
The first, and perhaps most important, such issue is growing inequality. In France, the percentage of national income earned by the richest 1 percent of the population has increased 4 percentage points since the mid-1980s.
Over the long-run, there is little doubt that this inequality is largely driven by globalization and technological innovation. As markets become more interconnected, countries increasingly specialize in industries for which they possess a comparative advantage.
For a country like France, where capital is plentiful and labor is expensive, these successful industries increasingly require a high level of education. Those in the traditional working class, therefore, find it more and more difficult to acquire stable, well-paying jobs and are often stuck with low-wage jobs in the non-tradables sector.
The development of labor-saving technology also contributes to this trend, since many low- and medium-skilled jobs in industry no longer exist. Indeed, in a high-wage country like France, the incentives to replace workers with technology are particularly strong.
All of these trends have been compounded by the effects of the recent “Great Recession.” In France, employment and wages were slow to recover, ensuring that lower income people were hard hit.
Of course, all of these circumstances are common to nearly all developed economies, and indeed inequality in France remains significantly lower than inequality in the United Kingdom or, especially, the United States. So what makes France different?
A Unique Situation
Some commentators have pointed to France’s political culture, where “fraternity” is a deeply enshrined principle. Although income in France remains more evenly distributed than in the United States, these commentators say, growing inequality is bound to shake the French political system more deeply. After all, the gross accumulation of wealth offends the founding ideas of French republicanism.
[pullquote]France, then, is stuck in a conundrum. Rigid labor markets provide stability to the majority of its citizens, but at the same time they create a substantial underclass denied permanent employment. [/pullquote]
Others argue that the yellow vest movement is motivated more by France’s unemployment than its inequality. The country’s unemployment rate is persistently high, especially among the young. Currently, it stands at 8.8 percent, and a whopping 20.2 percent for youth.
Many attribute France’s structural unemployment to its two-tiered labor market, where workers on formal contracts enjoy extraordinary protections from dismissal. Such a system means that the employed in France have more secure work (though on average lower pay) than those in the United States. But it also means that French businesses are reluctant to hire permanent employees, especially among recent, untested graduates, because they would face impediments firing them later.
As a result, unemployment remains high and many workers, especially youths, find themselves hired only on temporary contracts.
Unfortunately, the government’s efforts to free up France’s rigid labor markets have sparked protests from workers who are loath to give up the job security they consider their right. For example, when former President Jacques Chirac introduced the idea of temporary contracts for young employees as a way of encouraging hiring, huge student protests forced him to back off.
The French Conundrum
France, then, is stuck in a conundrum. Rigid labor markets provide stability to the majority of its citizens, but at the same time they create a substantial underclass denied permanent employment.
The country’s business and professional elites compete successfully on the international stage, and reap high rewards, while many average citizens are appalled by their county’s growing inequality. At the same time, economic reforms that might free up France’s labor market are opposed by large percentages of the population, including those they are probably hurting.
This is the challenge faced by France’s leaders. Reforms are needed, but they are nearly impossible politically.
A Changing Party System
This political challenge is all the more problematic given the recent collapse of France’s traditional party system.
France has always had a more complex and changing party system than most other established democracies. But in the 1980s, it appeared that the country was settling into a “two plus” structure, with the Gaullists to the center-right and the Socialists to the center-left as the strongest parties, and the communists, the far right, the liberals, and others at the margins.
All of that was overturned in the 2017 general elections, when both major parties lost a huge portion of their seat shares and the more extreme parties of the left and, especially, the right saw gains.
What was most striking about the election, however, was the extraordinary performance of a completely new party – La République en Marche! (LREM) – founded by former Socialist Finance Minister and 39-year-old dynamo Emmanuel Macron.
Macron came out of nowhere to win two-thirds of the vote in the second round of presidential polling, and his alliance secured a majority in the National Assembly and the right to appoint the prime minister.
What makes the LREM unique is its centrist populism, a seeming contradiction in terms. Macron succeeded by offering voters an outlet for their antiestablishment frustrations, but one that didn’t require them to choose candidates tending towards communism or fascism. His party was new and young and promised transformation without radicalism.
In many ways, France was lucky to have avoided the specter of the far-right National Front (now renamed the National Rally) taking power. Macron and his party were fresh and new, but advocated mostly sensible and centrist approaches to government. And they remain much preferable to the extreme and erratic leadership style of other populist leaders, for example Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.
The catch, however, is that, as with most populist movements arising outside established parties, LREM has very weak foundations. Its elected members are mostly fresh to politics and its ground organization is nearly non-existent. More to the point, the party is too new to have an established base.
All of this helps explain why the yellow vest protests gained so much traction so quickly. The public was disillusioned by the slow progress achieved the Macron and his party and had little reason to withhold judgment. Very rapidly, Macron’s approval rating dropped from over 60 percent to less than 30 percent and he went from a young and promising figure to a detested member of the cosmopolitan elite.
Moving Ahead
What, then, can we expect for the future?
While France has its share of economic and social challenges, the foundations of it polity and economy are strong. It would therefore be a gross exaggeration to say that France is in existential crisis.
Still, the yellow vest protests continue, with about 20,000 people taking to the street every week. This represents a much smaller number than we saw during the movement’s infancy, but the protestors who remain are highly motivated.
Most are peaceful and are fighting for a better life for themselves and their loved ones. Still, polling indicates that many protestors are supporters of extremist political parties. Marine Le Pen’s far right National Rally (formerly National Front) party was clearly a beneficiary of the yellow vests in the recent European elections.
And, sadly, the yellow vest movement has been infiltrated by small number of “casseurs,” people who break things. Some ugly ideologies can also be found among members of the movement, including disdain for Jews and hatred for the migrants who have flowed into the country over the past few years. As its numbers dwindle, the more extreme and less legitimate elements of the movement may become more prominent.
What is to be Done?
To cope with the yellow vest protests, and to address France’s long term challenges, its government needs to find a way to improve the employment prospects for all of its citizens. And it needs to spread the prosperity of its urban centers into rural communities and small towns.
Freeing up France’s labor market can be made consistent with the country’s social traditions by adopting an approach like “flexicurity” in Denmark. In such a system, firms can hire and fire with few restrictions, encouraging full employment. At the same time, the state supports those between jobs with income assistance, job retraining and the like. This approach might be more politically palatable in France since it allows the labor market to become more flexible and rational, but not at the expense of workers.
Spreading prosperity from France’s highly desirable metropoles to its declining rural areas and small towns is also a challenge, and perhaps the most difficult facing the Macron government. Efforts, already underway, to diversify government institutions and investments outside of Paris will help. But the real solution is likely to come only with further decentralization of state authority to regions, departments, and communes, something which Macron has promised. Only when local governments are more effectively empowered — and financed — to pursue the interests of their own constituents will France’s growth be more equitably spread.
None of these goals is likely to be achieved easily. It remains to be seen whether President Macron and the French political system can manage to extract France from its problems. The yellow vests may eventually fade away, and the country’s overall stability will remain intact. But without some basic changes, similar protests and unrest will surely rock France again.
Charles R. Hankla is Associate Professor of Political Science at Georgia State University in Atlanta. He is also Director of Governance Programs and Senior Research Associate at the university’s International Center for Public Policy (ICePP) and an affiliate of the Asian Studies Center. Dr. Hankla earned his PhD in 2005 from Emory University, and he also holds degrees from Georgetown University and the London School of Economics. In the spring and summer of 2013, he was a visiting scholar at Sciences Po Lille in France.
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