French President Emmanuel Macron on March 20 narrowly survived a no-confidence vote in the nation’s parliament triggered by his alarming use of executive power just a few days earlier. Macron gambled with his political career on March 16 by getting his prime minister to invoke constitutional powers allowing him to bypass a legislative vote and ram through a deeply unpopular pension reform scheme into law.
In France’s lower house of parliament, a robust 278 members voted in favor of the no-confidence resolution, just shy of the 287 needed to pass, and put an abrupt end to Macron’s government. The vote means the pension overhaul, which raises the retirement threshold from 62 to 64 years of age, will become law. But he is not out of the woods yet. The public fury sparked by Macron’s heavy-handed action shows no sign of abating.
Opposition: Macron ‘Doesn’t Have Any Legitimacy Anymore’
Protests have raged for days, with Paris being an epicenter. Macron’s government claims to be centrist but has no majority control in either the upper chamber Senate or lower chamber National Assembly. Elected officials representing the political left and right have equally expressed their extreme disdain for the unloved president.
“Only nine votes are missing … to bring both the government down and its reform down,” leftist MP Mathilde Panot said, state broadcaster France 24 reported. “The government is already dead in the eyes of the French, it doesn’t have any legitimacy anymore.”
Pension reform in France is every bit as much of a political third rail as Social Security reform in the United States. But the crisis facing Macron goes far beyond that, extending to questions about an authoritarian governing style that refuses to take the will of the people into account.
Macron had Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne invoke Article 49, Paragraph 3 to force his pension action into law. In some ways, the issue appears similar to the controversial use of executive orders by presidents in the United States. But 49.3 is much more powerful. Imagine an American president being able to use an executive order to get a bill detested by Congress passed into law without a vote. That is how shocking this is.
The article has an interesting history, dating back to the creation of the Fifth Republic in 1958. The new constitutional government was set up with Charles de Gaulle in mind, and strong powers were accorded to the office of the president.
When Merely Disliked Turns to Deeply Despised
Emmanuel Macron (Photo by Chesnot/Getty Images)
Article 49.3 has been invoked 100 times since 1958, a fact that some Macron defenders are emphasizing in an effort to show that there is nothing particularly unusual about its use. Detractors, however, note that Prime Minister Borne has implemented it a whopping 11 times in the 10 months since she took office in May 2022. Most of that dates to a battle over the Macron government’s 2023 budget proposals, yet critics point at Macron’s apparent ease in resorting to the measure.
The crux of the matter is that Macron fully understood how immensely polarizing the use of Article 49.3 would be in this particular instance. Yet he did not hesitate to press this “nuclear button” of French governance. That is an ominous sign.
As Liberty Nation noted in October, a disturbing trend is rampant in the West today in which admittedly vastly unpopular politicians sit in the highest elected offices of the land in England, Canada, France, and the United States.
“What do all four of these Western leaders have in common?” we wrote. “They share the same commitment to what is euphemistically called ‘the rules-based international order.’ The more accurate term is globalism. This orientation is inevitably baked into a system of politics in which Big Money calls the shots.”
How long can these governments stay in power in supposed representative democracies when they so clearly do not represent the interests of the citizenry they claim to serve?
“And here lies the weak spot: A political machinery that assures mediocrity will eventually be unable to sustain itself if its figureheads go from being merely disliked to deeply despised on a grand scale,” we wrote.
But, then again, we wondered:
“A more uncomfortable point to ponder is whether the ongoing ascension of political leaders that system allies openly concede are wildly unpopular represents a power flex against the general citizenry. A ‘yes, we know you can’t stand us but we’re not going anywhere’ taunt, even.”
France has now arrived at this point. By going nuclear on the most heated political issue in his nation, Macron is throwing down a gauntlet to the French people, daring them to do something about it.
But has he gone too far this time? A tweet originally sourced from a French journalist speaks volumes:
“Protesters are still [right now] walking the streets in Paris. And they’re singing that little song again: ‘Louis XVI, we decapitated him! Macron, we can do it again!’”
