With the Senate’s vote on pension reform, the government has undeniably scored a point. In a political agenda disrupted by strikes and their daily consequences, this deadline has taken on a particular significance: a crucial step paired with a turning point for future events. A moment of truth. However, the problem risks being its interpretation. Contrary to the Elysée’s hopes – real or feigned – of seeing the protest page turn definitively, it is highly likely that the adoption of this text will in no way defuse the protest movement in France. In all likelihood, it should even intensify.
By temporarily crystallizing, or perhaps by default, all discontent to the point of triggering multiple actions on the ground, the legislative process on pensions also limited its scope. It bounded its common reason for being. It set the rhythm of its apparent leitmotif. Much like a screen memory in psychoanalysis whose value lies in the relationship between the content of a recent story, dulled and acceptable for the subject, and another repressed one that relates traumatic prior episodes: retained at the conscious level, the former is indifferent. The latter is all the more significant because it is repressed.
By claiming to eliminate the main reason for the dissatisfaction, the forceful passage in the Upper Chamber and the expedited wrapping up of the file could, in return, break the containing barriers of anger, allow the true reasons for the popular growing exasperation to surface and fuel more intense mobilization. If it materializes, besides the failure of the government’s strategy in this matter, this catastrophic scenario would also prove the power’s erroneous perception of French expectations. Such is indicated by the – falsely naive? – request from the Minister of Labour asking “the unions to cease calling for demonstrations once the reform is adopted” or the reliance on the school holiday period – by mainly supplying gas stations on the highways – to hope to call an end to the game. Traditionally out of sync with the protest timing, the nascent unrest in universities, several of which are now blocked, does not foreshadow a truce in hostilities.
Considerably more complex to channel, independent of political logics or distanced from specific protest arguments, this catch-all dissatisfaction movement will nevertheless require new support: a price to pay for a hyper-presidency where no longer any fuse introduces the life-saving flexibility in the institutional management of political crises, Nicolas Sarkozy should bear the brunt of it all the more directly as this mode of operation forbids any retreat for the Elysée’s resident. “The monarch and the crowd” thus summarized a major Swiss daily regarding social tensions in France. Ambivalent about the circumstances of the “revolt” in the Hexagon, split between “fascination for this revolutionary romanticism” and “the inconsistency of the French,” noting the paradox of a majority among them who admit the necessity of this reform but support the strikes in the same proportions, the foreign press does not refrain from enlightening its readers about the “feeling of injustice” which, rightly or wrongly, prevails in France. In Germany, social dialogue functions correctly and the very great “reactivity to democratic requirements,” explainable by this country’s troubled history, would have led, according to newspapers, more than one minister across the Rhine involved in a judicial matter to immediate resignation. As for the austerity plan recently adopted by the new British Prime Minister – 500,000 public service posts eliminated in five years – the Churchillian reflex of the English, combined with the symbolic contribution of all – the Crown sees its budget also cut – currently wards off any threat of a large-scale protest in the United Kingdom.
Only the card of a cabinet reshuffle suggesting a change of course could constitute an electric shock capable of calming minds. However, not too much should be expected from it: if the personality of the head of state makes him unlikely to promote a political competitor, the prolonged wait-and-see attitude of the Elysée nevertheless betrays a choice of the next occupant of Matignon liable to be influenced by the country’s domestic state. And with good reason. To extend the analytical metaphor, it is with this reshuffle as with interpretation in sessions, which must not miss its mark: Sigmund Freud reminded of this: “the lion only jumps once!”.
