Since 2016 (the year of the massive movement against the employment laws of Francois Holland’s minister of employment, El Khomry), there has been no let-up in the struggle. There has been furious resistance by the workers against attempts by the Holland and Macron governments to push ahead with neo-liberal reforms, destroying living standards and employment rights.
After a lull at the start of Macron’s administration, the mass movement has come back with renewed strength. In early 2018, a strike about wages and working conditions sprang up in the EHPAD (retirement homes for elderly people). There were similar developments in other sectors, including a prolonged strike against privatisation of the SNCF (railways). Then came the eruption of the Yellow Vest movement: a huge social revolt which multiplied into massive demonstrations over three months from November 2018.
On 5th December 2019, France experienced a general strike, followed by nearly two months of spontaneous strikes and demonstrations across the whole economy, in protest against government attacks on retirement and pensions. Only the Covid pandemic interrupted this movement.
The government’s handling of the pandemic has aroused indignation amongst health-care workers, who are facing austerity and the destruction of the public healthcare system at the hands of the private sector. There is a mood of outrage among the majority of the population at government bungling and delay in the provision of masks, gel, gloves, respirators, oxygen, hospital beds and vaccines.
All these mobilisations were organised in the teeth of general repression, calling into question the very right to peaceful demonstrations in France.
Faced with this level of public protest, combined with its own failure to implement counter-reforms on behalf of the capitalist class, how has Macron’s government managed to hang on?
With presidential elections coming up in 2022, and the far-right Marine Le Pen waiting in the wings, what are the political perspectives for France?
To answer these questions, comrades of the socialist publication Aplutsoc. Olivier Delbeke