What’s going on in France ?

Dear Saudi friends,

As you have seen, France is going through a rough time. It actually caught me a bit off guard that you might be interested in this, as I am myself following things a bit from a distance.

I realize from messages I have received that there might be misconceptions about what led to the violence we have seen. So, in case you are interested, here are some elements of context.

The trigger for the protest which started a couple of weeks ago is the increase in the oil prices. In France we have two kinds of gas, regular and gasoil. Historically, gasoil was less taxed and overall cheaper, which lead a number of poorer households or people driving a lot to buy a gasoil car (my mum has one of them).

From my understanding, the government wants to align the tax between regular gas and gasoil. But instead of doing it incrementally, as some politicians have suggested, they have decided to do it in one go, which means an increase of something like 7 cents a liter (0,30 SAR a liter) on oil prices that are already quite high.

Those tax increases are motivated mainly by environmental concerns. The tax increase is just one measure. Another one the government introduced is more drastic restrictions on the level of emissions starting on January 1st 2019 (this is measured during the yearly car inspection). Poorer people who cannot afford a new car are afraid their older diesel car won’t pass, leaving them without a car to go to work.

The government has announced that it will offer subsidies to poorer people to offset the increase in oil taxes, there are already subsidies to help poorer people buy a car with low carbon emission but they are not enough. And other than that, the government is not backing down. As a result, the protesters continued protesting.

The tax increase is a problem, especially for people who are living on the countryside, people who need to use their cars everyday to go to work. Even with a small car (most French people have smaller cars), filling up your tank will cost you about 300 SAR. Because of the taxes, gas has become a big part of a household’s budget and while cities offer alternative means of transportation, people living outside cities might not have a choice.

This particular issue has created a divide in the French society. Most educated people usually living in the cities are in favor of those measures as a small contribution to fight climate change, which they see as the defining problem of our time. The measures won’t also affect them much, as these people have gotten used to alternative transportation means, from biking to work, to public transportation, to carpooling for weekend getaways. But less educated people with a lower income, who are struggling to make ends meet, have the feeling this is now too much. A lot of them don’t have other options available besides using their cars.

The tax increase is a problem, but if you ask me, it’s obvious the tax increase is only the straw that broke the camel’s back. Overall people are unhappy with Emmanuel Macron and his policies, because they have a feeling his policies are not going in the right direction and even more so, because they have a feeling he is not listening to objections.

Emmanuel Macron has done a lot of fundamental changes in a short period of time since he was elected. As you know, we have many taxes and he changed the structure of those taxes, in a way that I personally think is good. But people have fears and people have the perception that it is done against them. Emmanuel Macron is still suffering from the narrative that was used against him during the presidential campaign that he was a president for rich people because he had one day been a investment banker.

And to be fair, Emmanuel Macron has not been very good at managing people’s feelings. A few measures early in his presidency have rubbed people the wrong way, sending a negative signal. The subsidies for student housing has been decreased slightly, while the tax for the super-rich was canceled (collecting that tax was expensive and it was one of the reasons a lot of France’s super-rich were moving to London, Brussels or Switzerland). Another thing that rubbed people the wrong way, as stupid as it seems, was that the maximum speed on roads (excluding highways) is now 80km/hour, while it was 90km/hour. People on the countryside have had a hard time with this one, they feel it is wasting their time, they feel it might be done only for the purpose of making more money off them in speeding fines. Decision-makers in Paris might not realise how much harm they have done with such a seemingly small thing.

Overall, Emmanuel Macron is implementing the policy he was elected on, which is certainly not so common among our presidents, but I feel he has not been very good with his communication, showing insufficient empathy to the concerns of the more disadvantaged ones.

By the way, it makes me laugh when I read that Emmanuel Macron is a “Leftist”. Emmanuel Macron is neither a leftist, nor a socialist (I don’t think he was ever a member of the socialist party). And his government is headed by Edouard Philippe who was a member of the mainstream right-wing party before Emmanuel Macron named him prime minister. If you want to see what a leftist is like, look up Jean-Luc Melenchon, excellent public speaker, but quite extreme ideas.

As one of my friends recently pointed out, it’s true that life has become more expensive but the government is not necessarily to blame. It’s just that now people expect to have broadband access, a subscription to Netflix and other things you didn’t have before and those things add up in your budget. My friend was also pointing out that nowadays more and more people live on their own, so they have to pay a rent that used to be shared with someone else.

I joked at my friend who made this comment, telling him he sounded like a French who had lived abroad for too long (he lived in Brazil for a decade). French people who have never lived abroad tend to expect everything from the government. It fascinates me when I go back, people blame everything on the government. Sometimes, I dare to say it out loud, if we spent as much time and energy looking for solutions than we spent complaining about problems, we would had them solved already. A lot of people change their behaviors to be more budget-friendly, it's quite remarkable to see how "homemade" is trending, from meals to cosmetics.

But still our schools in France teach us critical thinking and we tend to overuse this skill, compared to problem solving... Overall, media also regularly point to the fact that French people on average have an insufficient knowledge of how the economy works, and that this doesn’t help understand, put into perspective or support the evolutions Emmanuel Macron is trying to bring to the economy...

So officially, this social movement is about defending the purchasing power, but one should not be naive that this is not people’s only motive. This is starting to look like a movement to overturn the current power. People have been asking Emmanuel Macron to resign, they have been asking for a new constitution, a “participative democracy”. Even in the wording they use, it’s clear that this feels a bit like 1789, when we abolished the French monarchy.

I would personally be very worried if we moved towards this “participative democracy” right now. You know Churchill’s famous phrase “The best argument against democracy is a 5-minute conversation with the average voter”. That is very true right now in France. Participative democracy is a great concept for an appeased society but a trap if it gives a voice to people’s anger. Right now, our constitution, the 5^th in the history of the French Republic, a constitution which is very inspired by our past as a monarchy, with the president as a figure of authority like an elected king, protects us against the anger, against the shortcuts, against the rampant racism and antisemitism that are clearly gaining traction in the society.

But facing Emmanuel Macron, there are a number of populist leaders who are trying to leverage this anger politically. Marine Le Pen, the leader of the right-wing party, is probably as popular as ever, so is Jean-Luc Melenchon, the leftist leader. Oddly I feel it is now as if the political sprectrum was not like it used to be, a landscape going from extreme left to extreme right, but rather becoming a circle with the line between extreme right and extreme left blurring. The politicians representing those options have ideas that are quite different, but both are banking on the anger, both are blaming Europe, and some of their voters are probably more similar than one might think.

French politics are becoming extremely polarized, but not in the traditional way right vs. left, rather in a new way, moderate vs. extreme. This is becoming worrying because if Emmanuel Macron doesn’t manage to fix his relationship to the people, our next president will most likely be an extreme one.

Going back to the protests and to the violence, which I realize might have shocked a lot of you, you need to be aware that nowadays a lot of those peaceful protests are hijacked by what they call “Black blocks”. I am not a specialist but basically, those people come to protest with the sole intention to engage in violence. It’s like a hobby. They break shopping windows, they set cars on fire, they might provoke the police and film, not their provocation but the police’s reaction to the provocation. I suspect some of these kids have become quite good at this.

They are actually one of the reasons why the face veil is prohibited in France. Most of them go to those protests wearing face covers, not to be identified while they are engaging in violence. And so we passed a law to make it mandatory for people to show their face in the public space.

Any peaceful protest can go wrong because of them. I am not too familiar with protests, but I think that at some point, normal people leave the protest to go home and then, it’s those people that we also call the “breakers” that are left facing the police. If you don’t pay attention, if you stay too long, if things turn sour early, you might get caught in the middle of those fights between the police and those violent protesters who are basically questioning authority. And surely then, being among them, you might be treated like them, whether you are a man or a woman. I am sure the police do their best but it's probably not always easy as they must be targeted themselves.

Also, the reason I for example am not too familiar with protests, is because I feel that as a French citizen, you have a wide array of ways to complain and be heard by the people in charge. We have the right to vote, we have the right to protest as long as it’s peaceful, we have the right to go on strike, we have the right to join unions, we can meet with our representatives, we can decide to run for office ourselves, etc. By all means, I think we are spoiled brats. I understand people might be unhappy but there are rules when it comes to expressing your frustration.

You know what’s really ironic is that the same day in Paris, there was another march, a feminist march. It was peaceful, it attracted more participants than the one that turned violent, and it barely got an media coverage because everyone was mesmerized by the violent one.

I personally feel that the media also bears some responsibility there. A decade ago, we increased the number of TV channels and those channels became widely available for free. It seemed like a great idea but I have been questioning lately how this influences society in a bad way. A number of those channels are not doing well economically speaking. As a result, they offer programming that I am finding quite poor, clearly quite populist. There are a lot of reality TV shows, a lot of talk shows because they are cheaper to produce than, say, fiction. There are a number of news channels which always make things sound bigger and more threatening than they are (because otherwise they would be boring to watch). On the talk shows also, the unofficial rule is to give a voice to all opinions in the society. And god, really, sometimes I am appalled by what you hear nowadays. But people have this perception that because someone says on television the same thing they are thinking, this must be right.

Recently we had a controversy. This commentator who is quite known and quite popular for being critical of immigration and of Islam, criticized someone who had an African first name, because he said her parents should have chosen a proper French name for her. We spent a week talking about this, weeks later people people are still mentioning it. This constant noise, this constant flow of stupid controversies is exhausting, certainly one of the reasons I left France.

And to me, it’s appaling to hear such a thing, that someone should have a French first name to be a “proper French”. We are French because we have the French citizenship, there are no such considerations as people’s first or last name, people’s skin color, people’s accent, people’s religion. The Republic is supposed to see us all as equals. I am glad to see there is a new generation of influencers and intellectuals, people who weren't around when I left France in 2010, who are fighting back on those narratives.

But again, some people must think that since this man says it on television, it must be a valid opinion to have.

I am worried to see where some democracies are going. I am worried to see the populists take over. I am smiling when I heard people in France criticize the countries of the Middle East because they are not democracies. It would be much more comfortable for me intellectually speaking if I still had such clarity, but, after living so long in the UAE, I know that things are more complex.

I hope this was helpful :)

PS I live in Dubai and I wish I knew a place, a forum, where I could discuss those things with other like-minded individuals. If you know about anything, people let me know.