Although the “yellow vests” are often said to have come out of nowhere, President Macron has never enjoyed widespread support and disenchantment with him has been growing for several months. He cuts an increasingly isolated figure

Although the “yellow vests” are often said to have come out of nowhere, President Macron has never enjoyed widespread support and disenchantment with him has been growing for several months. He cuts an increasingly isolated figure

At the height of the “yellow vest” (gilets jaunes) riots a friend in Paris responded to my question – Is France ungovernable? – by reminding me that, “In France we normally re-run the Revolution every 15 to 20 years.” He described the events in the street beneath his window as quasi-insurrectionelle – but seemed untroubled by the situation. The army, he reflected, was solide (reliable), in due course the shops and museums would re-open and the empty tourist hotels would fill up. The problem, he said, was not the governance of France, but the man who was attempting to govern it.

In terms of delivering his manifesto commitments, the first 15 months of Emmanuel Macron’s presidency were a success. He won thanks to the destruction during the election campaign of the representatives of the two parties that have provided every president of the Fifth Republic since de Gaulle invented it in 1958. Having promised to modernise France, Macron started by forcing through simplified employment laws, governing by decree when necessary. Then, last spring, he defeated the rail unions, and defied a three-month strike, effectively denationalising the SNCF (French railways) and cancelling the company’s bloated pension scheme. Violent demonstrations in central Paris by “Black bloc” (anarchists and supporters of the extreme left) were faced down and the union leadership reduced to irrelevance. Macron’s prime minister, Edouard Philippe, came from the mainstream right, his first minister of the interior, Gérard Collomb, was a Socialist party city boss. Macron’s theory – that “the politics of left and right” had been replaced by the struggle between “progressives and nationalists” – seemed to have been validated.

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