Macron’s Great Debate Finds What France Wants: Lower Taxes, No Cuts to Services

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/08/world/europe/france-macron-yellow-vest.html

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PARIS — The moment of truth approached on Monday for President Emmanuel Macron’s strategy for sucking the wind out of the Yellow Vest protest movement, as his prime minister presented the conclusions of a three-month national consultation in which some 1.5 million French citizens let the government know what they wanted.

The answer? Lower taxes, in a country with the highest tax burden — 46 percent of gross domestic product — of any developed nation. But where, and how, to do so, presents the French government with a tricky conundrum: The same citizens did not come out for any reduction in France’s expansive social safety net or generous provision of public services.

Whether the government’s formula for resolving the dilemma, which has yet to be determined, will be enough to satisfy the for-now quiescent protest movement is uncertain. The Yellow Vests rejected the “Great National Debate” from the beginning, though the protest movement has hit its lowest ebb in numbers and public support.

Mr. Macron’s subordinates insist that they have heard the message. “We’ve reached zero fiscal tolerance,” Prime Minister Édouard Philippe told an audience of officials at the Grand Palais in Paris Monday, presenting the conclusions of the project.

“We’ve got to lower taxes,” Mr. Philippe said. “There is an immense fiscal exasperation.”

It is now up to Mr. Macron himself to find concrete measures to translate the citizens’ demands in the coming weeks. The Yellow Vest protest itself began as an uprising over a raise in gas taxes, which Mr. Macron rescinded soon after.

Mr. Macron came up with the “Great National Debate” idea as the Yellow Vest demonstrators were wreaking havoc in French cities, smashing in store windows and prompting some in the president’s own circle to fear for his future. Half in desperation, he reached for a surefire national sedative: Let the French talk it out.

Local talk-fests, spearheaded by the president himself, aired citizen grievances, with the hope of stifling a principal Yellow Vest complaint, that the French were not being heard. Plenty now have been, though how representative the talkers were has itself become a matter of debate.

Many of those who attended around 10,000 local debates were elderly or retired, in a country where the retirement age is a mere 62, and there are many, many citizens with lots of time on their hands.

But the endless hours of meeting with local officials, often with Mr. Macron doing most of talking, may have more successfully bludgeoned the Yellow Vests into submission than any number of riot police.

Only 22,300 people marched in the Yellow Vest protest across France Saturday, the lowest turnout yet, and less than a tenth of those who took part in the first marches on Nov. 17 last year. And only about 35 percent of the French still support them, less than half the figure at the movement’s peak.

Mr. Macron, by going week after week deep into the country and standing for hours on end lecturing and taking questions, has clawed back some of the popularity he lost at the height of the Yellow Vest movement.

He is now supported by some 29 percent of the French, according to an IFOP poll last week, around his level of support at the beginning of the protests. After weeks of trailing Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National party, formerly the National Front, in polls for May’s elections to the European Parliament, Mr. Macron has finally crept out in front.

“Renewing dialogue and deflating the anger — in one sense, he’s succeeded,” said Chloé Morin, a public opinion expert at the Ipsos consultancy in Paris. “But, it was just one part of the French” who participated in the “Great National Debate,” said Ms. Morin.

“It was a certain category of the population, and not necessarily a representative one: city-dwellers, those who are reasonably off. So, it’s been a relative success,” she said. “He’s managed to regain his base of popularity — with his electorate, and with the right.”

But the large segment of the population that once identified with the Yellow Vests is another matter.

“I have a fear that whatever decisions Emmanuel Macron takes, even if they are strong ones, that knowing the Yellow Vests as I do, there is a kind of suicidal tendency, a tendency to say, ‘All politicians are rotten,’” said Sonia Krimi, a 36-year-old member of Parliament in Mr. Macron’s party.

In a National Assembly where dissent from the presidential line is rare, Ms. Krimi, a Tunisian-born lawmaker who represents part of Cherbourg, is known for sometimes opposing the president, and she has in the past expressed sympathy for the protesters.

“It’s like two parallel lines,” she said, referring to the government and the Yellow Vests, “and the lines never join.”

Others also expressed concerns about the representativeness of the government’s sample.

“The problem is, who actually came to the debates, in relation to those we never hear from?” asked Jean-Michel Clément, a parliamentarian who left Mr. Macron’s party last year. “It was people who were already in the know. Those who weren’t either didn’t come or didn’t talk.”

Whatever the source, the government insisted it has heard. “We’ve gotten the message loud and clear,” Mr. Philippe, the prime minister, said at the Grand Palais Monday.

The “message” as received by Mr. Philippe translated into a series of abstractions that could be difficult to translate into concrete policy. He said the French who took part had also expressed concerns about “isolation, abandonment and indifference” from public officials, about having “a democracy that is more representative and efficient,” and about climate change.

“As for the conclusions that are to be drawn, I’m waiting to hear them,” said Mr. Clément. “We’re faced with some contradictions. We’re hearing less taxes on one side, and on the other more public services. So its going to be a complicated equation,” he said. “A delicate exercise.”

On the streets of Paris there was skepticism all around, as there often is. “The Great National Debate won’t put an end to anything,” said Marc Flandrin, 48, a butcher in the suburb of Alfortville. “Soon it will be the turn of the retired people to demonstrate. I think that in September it is going to get worse.”

Marc Denis, a 51-year-old auditor for the national railway company, the S.N.C.F., approved of the debate, but wondered whether it would change anything. “I don’t think the Yellow Vest movement will end,” he said. “It is now rooted in France.”

Ms. Krimi, the parliamentarian, said, “It’s too early to talk of success or failure.”

“It’s a complex situation, and it needs a complex response,” she said. “There has to be a political vision. People are sick of politicians and their promises.”