France’s ‘Block Everything’ Protests – The Start of a Unifying Theme for Troubled Democracies?

On Wednesday, a day after France’s assembly gave a no-confidence vote to its Prime Minister that resulted in his resignation, over 200 thousand people went into the streets to protest inequality and potential budget cuts proposed by the Macron administration.

 

The great majority of the participants polled were adherents to left or far-left politics. The right was an early advocate of the idea to demonstrate, but the increasing role of the left, still a sworn enemy, discouraged many from the right. The far-right party, the National Rally (RN), has focused its key ideological tenets around immigration, nationalism and euro-skepticism.  The RN is also anti-woke, which tends to alienate it from the left.  But its strong populist nature is fed significantly by economic insecurity, which suggests a possibility for a future alliance.

 

The French republic, like the USA, has a debt larger than its GDP (123%).  It also has seen dramatic increases in income and wealth disparity over the last 40 years similar to the those in the USA.  The challenge of coming up with a budget that begins to reduce that debt has overwhelmed Macron and his party, somewhat ironically named Renaissance.

 

All of the western democracies are facing similar challenges.  Both moderate left and right parties have failed to rein in budget deficits and growing populist movements are becoming significant threats.  In most cases, the efforts to create a balanced budget are focused on spending cuts rather than increases in taxes – a unilateral approach that is primarily  alienating the lower classes on the left presently, but has the potential to broaden its repugnance.

 

The economic situation in all of these countries is becoming more precarious with each passing year.  Interest payments on debt are rising, military outlays are increasing and populations are aging. The attempts to cut public services or delay retirements are extremely unpopular, but up to now have not created a united front across the political spectrum.

 

If the economic trends continue to be bleak and begin to seriously impact quality of life and employment opportunities, then I predict the populist movements will finally look past their cultural and immigration focus and find common cause with the left in assailing the absurdly unequal distribution of income and wealth across the developed world.

Movements like ‘block everything’ (bloquons tout!) will begin to attract people from across the political spectrum.  The ruling classes, who generally resist raising taxes out of a combination of self-interest and free market dogma, will finally be forced to address both sides of the budget equation.  If there must be pain (and there is no doubt that pain will be necessary) then the pain must be shared or there will be hell to pay.