The revolution from above triumphs. The revolution of the street against the pension reform is subject. With its verdict, France’s Constitutional Council has taken a very French path in order to gradually overcome resistance from below.
The six men and three women, who come from the same state-supporting upper class as Emmanuel Macron, have approved the substance of the law, which gradually raises the retirement age from 62 to 64, individual aspects but tilted. For example the Senior Citizens Index. It obliges companies to disclose how many employees over the age of 55 they employ.
That sounds like a Solomon solution. The prestige project, which the President pushed through undemocratically by German standards, without a vote in Parliament, is plucked but not buried. Apparently there should be neither winners nor vanquished.
Unions mobilize for May Day
Will the calculation work out? Not in a hurry. The showdown between “above” and “below” has divided society and turned some areas of the big cities into zones similar to civil wars.
The unions have rejected Macron’s offer to meet for dialogue after the verdict. They want to use the workers’ day on May 1st and the time until then to mobilize. Street protests, with fires, intimidating police presence and arrests, will continue for the next few weeks.
At the same time, however, it is becoming apparent that the number of protesters is decreasing and is no longer in the hundreds of thousands. It is quite possible that the resistance will gradually run out.
The coming weeks will also be a test of whether the last option, to stop the pension reform through a referendum, has any chance of success. To do this, the opponents would have to collect signatures from ten percent of those entitled to vote within nine months: around 4.8 million. So far, there has never been a referendum in this way.
For German observers, the ugly scenes from France offer a reason to subject the clichéd narratives about democracy and the rule of law in various regions of the EU to a reality test. Does the highly valued neighbor in the west meet the German standards for orderly relationships? And to a greater extent than the rightly criticized rulers in Poland and Hungary, who look down on many Germans as second-class Europeans?
Is Macron acting more democratically than Hungary and Poland?
What would the public judgment be like if national populists like Viktor Orban in Budapest or the PiS government in Warsaw force such a fundamental reform as raising the retirement age with similar authoritarian methods as Macron in Paris: without a vote in parliament. And then have them approved by a constitutional council, most of whose members have personally chosen them. There is no constitutional court in France.
Other countries, all customs. Article 49.3 of the constitution, with which Macron undermined parliament, is one of the “normal” tools of French governments. Everyone has used it extensively since General de Gaulle introduced it in 1958 to govern without a parliamentary majority.
The EU states each have their own traditions of how they live their democracy and the rule of law. Common standards are missing. Therefore, the appeal to a standard supposedly agreed in the EU treaties is a farce similar to the supposedly democratic and formally constitutional norms of pension reform in France.
The real reason why Macron chose this problematic path: he saw no other way to get France out of its structural inability to reform. Sooner or later it would have led to national bankruptcy and endangered the euro.
