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NY Times, April 18, 2019
Inequality Fuels Rage of ‘Yellow Vests’ in Equality-Obsessed France
By Peter S. Goodman
BOURGES, France — In a world seething with anger over the widening gap
between the rich and everyone else, France stands out as a country
elaborately engineered to protect social peace.
It has less economic inequality than the United States, Canada and
Britain, according to the World Bank. Its people enjoy comprehensive
health care under a national insurance program. Only Denmark, Belgium
and Sweden spend a larger percentage of their economies on social
welfare programs for working-age citizens, according to an analysis by
the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Even so, France is consumed by a ferocious and sustained outpouring of
social unrest. The tumultuous, intermittently violent protests of the
so-called Yellow Vest movement have shaken the country since they began
in November, intensifying in recent weeks.
President Emmanuel Macron had been preparing to address the nation last
Monday to detail new measures in response to the demonstrations. But as
the Notre-Dame cathedral went up in flames that evening, Mr. Macron
scrapped his address, and used the devastation of a beloved and iconic
monument to call for national unity.
It may be a hard sell. The anger drawing people to the barricades has
been fueled by a sense that the national interest has long been
undermined by Mr. Macron’s own economic class, the globe-trotting
financiers who have turned France into a sanctuary for the rich. That
grievance was amplified by concerns that France’s wealthiest would be
able to benefit from tax breaks for their sizable donations to rebuild
the cathedral.
In part, the anger drawing people to the barricades reflects forces at
work in much of the developed world, as the bounty of economic expansion
flows disproportionately to the wealthy. But the demonstrations have
also drawn fuel from more narrowly French laments: The traditionally
generous social welfare system is increasingly neglecting key slices of
the populace, especially young people, tripping deep-seated notions
about fairness that date back to the French Revolution.
“The government promotes equality very strongly,” says Louis Maurin,
director of French Inequality Watch, a research institution in the city
of Tours. “In every school in France, it’s written on the walls:
liberté, égalité, fraternité. Yet everyone thinks people are gaming the
tax system. The feeling of being cheated can make you really angry.”
Though France may seem a bastion of egalitarianism compared with
conspicuously unequal societies like the United States, it has seen a
widening of the gap separating the affluent from the rest of the nation.
Average incomes for the richest 1 percent of French households doubled
between 1983 and 2015, while the bottom 99 percent saw incomes rise by
only one-fourth, according to the French economist Thomas Piketty.
Beneath these broad indicators, France is cleaved by profound forms of
inequality: between urban and rural communities; full-time employees and
temporary workers; graduates of prestigious universities and the
plebeian masses. And not least, between retirees, who maintain the
divine right of pensions, and younger people excluded from social
welfare programs.
The Yellow Vests reverberate as a primal scream from working-class
France at the tax-avoiding, wealth-hogging Parisian glitterati enabled
by a government now headed by one of its own, Mr. Macron, a former
investment banker. But the movement is also consumed with a historical
French aspiration: protecting and even expanding national welfare
programs in the face of worries over mounting debts and stagnant
economic growth.
Such tensions were already active when Mr. Macron assumed the presidency
two years ago.
He prescribed reforms aimed at rejuvenating the economy. In his telling,
outdated strictures on business and institutionalized hostility toward
the wealthy hindered entrepreneurialism. A labor code forged over
centuries to protect workers discouraged investment, yielding an
unemployment rate stuck above 9 percent.
Mr. Macron vowed to make France hospitable to global capital, trading
worker protections for economic revival. He made it easier for employers
to fire workers on the assumption that this would enhance their
inclination to hire. He cut taxes on the wealthiest French households.
Outside France, financiers celebrated the young, charismatic new
president who had replaced the narrative of decline with vibrancy. Yet
inside France, and especially outside Paris, Mr. Macron’s agenda
resonated as class warfare.
idized apartment.CreditAndrea Mantovani for The New York Times
Eager to avoid perilously unpopular cuts to social welfare programs, he
increased a range of taxes on the middle class and working poor. He was
cutting taxes for people in designer suits, his fellow members of the
Davos set, while sticking the bill on those donning work boots for a living.
Such policies would probably produce anger anywhere. In France, where
equality is more than a word engraved on monuments, but a moral code, it
yielded rage.
“Macron is out for the rich people,” says Nadia Benkmis, 36, a mother of
six here in Bourges, a modest town 130 miles south of Paris. “He wants
to exterminate poor people, like the way the Jews were exterminated.”
She says this while standing in the parking lot of a local food bank,
bearing two shopping bags full of donated groceries. The shelves inside
offer a cornucopia befitting France: gleaming leeks, beefsteaks,
Camembert cheese. For Ms. Benkmis, her weekly visits are a mortifying
reminder of her lost station.
“My family was rich when I was growing up,” she says. Her own life has
traced the arc of downward mobility. She used to clean houses, but gave
that up when the youngest of her six children was born a year ago. She
does not qualify for unemployment benefits.
Her husband does not work, either. If he did, they would surrender the
government benefits that now sustain them: some 1,200 euros ($1,350) a
month in cash assistance for their children, plus a monthly housing
subsidy of €500.
These sorts of calculations are enmeshed in the daily life of Bourges.
Once a hub of munitions factories, the town has lost jobs in recent
decades. Remaining operations are inclined to hire temporary workers,
mirroring a national trend.
Over the last 18 years, open-ended labor contracts in France have
remained flat at about one million, while the number of contracts
lasting less than a month exploded to 4.5 million from 1.6 million,
according to Philippe Askenazy, a labor economist at the French National
Center for Scientific Research. Only about half of those on short
contracts are eligible for unemployment benefits.
“Bosses prefer taking on temporary workers,” says Virginie Bonnin, 40,
who works in local auto parts plants. “We are disposable.”
A single mother of three girls, Ms. Bonnin earns €1,900 a month. She
learns on Thursday nights what her hours will be for the coming week.
When her jobs end, she is sustained by unemployment benefits of about
€1,400 a month.
“I’m not the worst off,” she says. “But it’s tricky. In those times, I
will not eat meat so that the kids can eat meat.” Her last summer
vacation, a sacred French institution, was two years ago.
Ms. Bonnin was provoked into joining the Yellow Vests by the same
measure that mobilized much of the country, a tax on gasoline that was
to take effect in January.
Mr. Macron promoted it as a means of adapting to climate change. Outside
major cities, where people rely on cars to get nearly everywhere, it
supplied proof that the president was indifferent to the working class.
“Macron is concerned with the end of the world,” one Yellow Vest slogan
put it. “We are concerned with the end of the month.”
That accusation endured even after Mr. Macron suspended the gas tax in
the face of Yellow Vest furor.
“Having to make sacrifices while rich people aren’t paying taxes
anymore,” Ms. Bonnin says, “there’s a sense of despair, as well as a
sense of social injustice.”
This notion animates many of the Yellow Vest participants. More than a
threat to livelihoods, Mr. Macron’s reforms constitute a breach of the
French social order, an attack on the understanding that the state looks
out for struggling people.
Such thinking holds special currency among white people born in France,
who dominate the ranks of the Yellow Vests. Many echo sentiments heard
across Europe amid an influx of Muslim migrants, and in the United
States, where President Trump has fomented fear of immigrants. They
claim that outsiders are capturing benefits that should be going to
French-born working people.
Coralie Annovazzi, 20, still lives with her parents as she works
temporary waitressing jobs. She gets no cash assistance from the
government, because people under 25 are not eligible.
Poverty among French people 18 to 25 years old leapt to 14 percent in
2015 from 8.8 percent in 1984 after factoring in taxes and grants from
the government, by Mr. Askenazy’s reckoning. Over the same period,
poverty among those age 51 to 65 dropped to 7 percent from 11 percent.
“There’s not enough for young people,” Ms. Annovazzi says, as she sits
inside a tent at a Yellow Vest camp.
But her harshest words are reserved for the migrants living in a nearby
motel, alongside a lifeless stretch of highway.
Nearly 100 young men from Afghanistan, Sudan and other war-torn
countries sit listlessly in their rooms, unable to work while they wait
for their asylum claims to be processed. They subsist on state grants of
about €200 a month.
If black people had thronged the demonstrations, Checkene Sacko, 18,
said, the police “would already have given themselves permission to
shoot them all.”
To Ms. Annovazzi, their presence reveals how native-born French people
have seen their status usurped.
“These migrants, they have gotten the latest sneakers, the latest
smartphones,” she says. “All of that is paid for by the state.”
Claudine Malardie, 53, nods excitedly.
“If you’re French, you don’t get any assistance,” she says. “Give me a
pot of black paint and I’ll paint my face black, and then I will get
benefits.”
In fact, Ms. Malardie does receives benefits, an €860-a-month disability
payment. She pays €300 a month in rent for a state-subsidized apartment.
Such attitudes have distanced the Yellow Vests from minority communities.
In Grigny, a remote suburb south of Paris, African and Arab immigrant
families fill dilapidated 15-story apartment towers. Elevators are
frequently out of service, forcing even pregnant women to climb stairs.
People complain that they cannot secure jobs, because a Grigny address
is a mark of ill repute.
“We are treated like foreigners,” says Checkene Sacko, 18, who was born
in France, the son of immigrants from Mali.
He and others in Grigny applaud the Yellow Vests for demanding better
wages. But they recall how local protests over police brutality in 2005
were largely dismissed by the French public as the work of thugs, in
contrast to the lionizing of the Yellow Vests. A tax on gas, they note,
is a problem only for people who can afford cars.
If black people had thronged the demonstrations, he adds, the police
“would already have given themselves permission to shoot them all.”
Racist tropes notwithstanding, the Yellow Vests have divined a decisive
truth: Working poor people can no longer take for granted the succor of
the French state.
For most of the 20th century, France was ruled by the notion that
progressive taxation and publicly financed social insurance programs
were the best way to preserve amity.
But in the early 1980s, the government began cutting support for
low-income people. By 2014, barely 20 percent of government cash
benefits were going to households in the bottom fifth of French incomes,
according to research by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development. That was less than Finland (42 percent), Britain (33
percent) and even the United States (22 percent).
Reversing that trend confronts difficult arithmetic. French government
debt amounts to 97 percent of the nation’s annual economic output,
according to the International Monetary Fund. As one of 19 nations that
share the euro currency, France is severely constrained in its ability
to run further deficits, limiting social spending.
In the face of the Yellow Vest demonstrations, President Macron dropped
some tax increases and lifted the minimum wage. But that failed to
mollify the protesters, leaving France in a familiar place: unable to
jolt a stalled economy with spending, and unable to bolster aid for poor
people. Unless, that is, Mr. Macron suddenly gained a proclivity for
taxing rich people.
In Bourges on a recent Saturday, Ms. Bonnin and other activists dawdle
in a crosswalk, blocking cars in a show of dismay for the trajectory of
French life. Three police officers ask them to allow traffic to flow,
bringing a feint of compliance.
One demonstrator carries a speaker blasting a protest song. “Macron,
shut your mouth,” the chorus resounds. “That will be good for France.”
The demonstrators shout the lyrics in unison, and one of the policemen
laughs.
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