Emmanuel Macron Was Supposed to Be the Anti-Trump -- He's Not
Saturday, March 03, 2018
By Juliette Legendre, Inequality.org | Op-Ed
Coming just months after the election of Donald Trump in the United States,
and as illiberal authoritarianism seemed to be creeping all over Europe, the
election of French president Emmanuel Macron brought a sigh of relief to
many across Western democracies.
It was May 2017 when Macron, a pro-European centrist, decisively defeated
the far-right, Euroskeptic Marine le Pen. Enthusiastic and patriotic
messages such as "Vive la France" or "Vive l'Europe" poured in on Twitter
from both sides of the Atlantic.
Some Americans weren't shy about describing Macron's victory as a defeat for
both Trump and right-wing nationalism around the world. "Macron's win is a
blow to far-right nationalism," former Obama adviser Ben Rhodes tweeted, and
"and a sign that the Brexit-Trump wave has broken in West." Trump's defeated
rival Hillary Clinton hailed the French vote as a "victory for Macron, for
France, the EU, and the world."
Immediately after Macron took office, the young president postured to show
the world he was no pushover. At his first official meeting with Trump ahead
of the NATO summit that May, Macron engaged Trump in a bone crushing,
never-ending, awkward handshake that played out like a standoff between the
two men's divergent politics.
Videos and second by second analysis flooded the news cycle. "That's how you
ensure you are respected," Macron gloated to the Journal du Dimanche
newspaper afterward. "You have to show you won't make small concessions --
not even symbolic ones."
Riding on this confident wave, Macron went on to troll Trump's decision to
withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement by inviting US scientists and
engineers to come work in France -- and then launching a campaign called
"Make the planet great again."
But what some thought was the beginning of a boxing match between Macron and
Trump ended up being a highly orchestrated WWE. The rivalry didn't last
long. Indeed, just two months after the handshake, Macron feted Trump at a
Bastille Day military parade in Paris. Trump was so impressed that he
recently ordered his own military parade in the United States.
The policy convergence between the two rivals, however, goes far beyond a
shared fondness for military pomp.
"President of the Rich"
Similarly to Trump, Macron promised a renewal of politics that would
transcend the traditional left-right split. He crafted an image of himself
as a highly ambitious leader who was unafraid of carrying out bold reforms
and challenging the status quo in a Napoleonic -- or Trumpian -- kind of
way.
More than eight months after he took office, it's now clear that Macron is
no meek centrist -- and definitely not a progressive. He's more like a
right-leaning, pro-market, elitist monarch, who shares more in common with
Trump than his admirers imagined.
The former investment banker didn't wait long to start shaking the
foundation of the French labor market. A few months after being elected,
ignoring mass protests and concerns from unions, he enacted deeply
controversial labor reforms with a series of executive orders.
Macron's "reforms" entirely reorganized the French labor market to give
unprecedented power to employers and corporations. They play on the false
and dangerous promise that deregulating labor markets will result in reduced
unemployment and economic growth. While the French labor market remains more
protective of workers than say, the U.S. model, this reform brings France
much closer to the American model.
A few months later, Macron's bloc in the French parliament voted on a new
budget that Trump would've happily signed. It slashed the corporate tax rate
down to 25 percent (from 33 percent), scrapped a longstanding "solidarity
tax on wealth" (France was the last EU country to have a wealth tax), cut
1.7 billion euros in housing aid, and eliminated 120,000 public contract
jobs.
This led the well-respected French economist Thomas Piketty to compare
Macron to Trump, who just passed a $1.5 trillion tax giveaway to the rich
and corporations in the United States.
Both men, Piketty argues, share the same flawed economic vision -- a variant
of the trickle-down theory that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher swore
by. And both falsely claim that cutting taxes on the wealthiest benefits
ordinary people and stimulates the economy by giving the rich incentives to
invest in their country.
This theory was, of course, never proven scientifically -- and au contraire,
reports have shown that these policies contribute to the rise of deep
inequality. According to the Observatoire Français des Conjonctures
Economiques (OFCE), an independent economic research center, 42 percent of
the French tax reduction will in fact only benefit the wealthiest 2 percent.
The numbers are comparably skewed in the United States.
Trump and Macron "refuse to take into account facts which are now well
established, namely that the groups to which they give preference are those
who have already acquired a disproportionate share of the growth in recent
decades," Piketty concludes. Yet both presidents want the masses to cherish
the wealthy, whom Trump hails as "job creators" and Macron calls "lead
climbers."
No wonder opposition parties in France are calling Macron the "president of
the rich."
Inhumanity to Immigrants
More surprisingly, given Macron's image as a redoubt against France's
resurgent far right, the French president has tacked a decidedly Trumpian
line on immigration. The man who once congratulated German Prime Minister
Angela Merkel for responding "humanly" to the refugee crisis by opening
Germany's doors now supports a crackdown on undocumented migrants.
This month, the administration is expected to unveil a new migration and
asylum bill that will toughen immigration laws in an unprecedented way.
NGOs, charities, and non-profit organizations describe the bill as inhumane
and warn of potential human rights violations. "No government since the end
of World War Two has dared" to go as far as Macron in tightening migration,
French immigration Patrick Weil told Europe 1. Even members of Macron's own
party are expressing serious concerns.
The bill reduces the time for migrants to apply for asylum from 120 days to
90 days, and to two weeks to appeal a decision instead of a month. On the
other hand, it would increase the maximum time migrants spend in detention
centers from 45 days to 90 days, and from 16 hours to 24 hours in case of
administrative detention.
These measures give authorities more time and power to increase and
accelerate deportations for those who are deemed unqualified for asylum.
It's a tidy parallel to the massive deportation apparatus the Trump is
building in the United States, while drastically cutting back the number of
refugees the country accepts.
Meanwhile, humanitarian groups such as Human Rights Watch and Doctors
Without Borders have been condemning French authorities for turning a blind
eye to widespread reports of police violence against migrants, such as
confiscating their sleeping bags and blankets in freezing temperatures,
barring aid groups from distributing basic supplies, and indiscriminately
attacking people with pepper spray.
And late last year, Macron's interior minister, Gerard Collomb, ordered
regional authorities to conduct ID checks in emergency shelters. This would
turn away undocumented migrants from seeking refuge and help in times of
emergency.
Sure, the French president is highly educated, able to hold philosophical
discussions, and does not bully his opponents on Twitter like his American
counterpart, who's often described as unstable, provocative, and vulgar.
However, they both have authoritarian tendencies and hold great disdain for
the poor.
If there's a humane alternative to the plutocratic and xenophobic politics
of the far right on both sides of the Atlantic, it won't be found in
Macron's deceptively right-wing centrism.
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This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not
be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
Juliette Legendre
Juliette Legendre is a researcher for Foreign Policy In Focus at the
Institute for Policy Studies.
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