Macron saw that France was ailing economically & he concluded that the overriding thing he had to do was make France more attractive to investors & investment. So he cut taxes on the wealthy & reduced labor protections. Guess what, many struggling French workers got angry.
Then Macron, a champion of the Paris Climate Accords decided he wanted to go greener--so he raised the tax on gasoline. (This also helped cut France's budget deficit) The tax increase especially hurt French workers who drove to work & were already struggling. Workers got angrier.
At a time when far-right, anti-immigrant parties in Europe were vigorously courting workers & making huge political gains, Macron's comfort-the-rich & stick-it-to-workers policies were appallingly tone deaf. I fear the biggest political beneficiary will be far-right Marine LePen.
Macron is now finally giving some tax cuts to France's workers. He would have been far smarter to couple some tax cuts to workers early on with his tax cuts for the rich, which aimed to make France more attractive to investment to help create jobs & cut France's high jobless rate
Macron saw higher gas taxes as a way to promote green policies & reduce greenhouse gases. He should've coupled the gas taxes with tax rebates to France's struggling working class to help offset the pain of his gas taxes—That might have helped prevent worker anger from overflowing
I keep wondering how someone as smart as Macron could be so tone deaf. How could he have adopted such stick-it-to-the-workers policies when there has been such a huge, highly visible wave of worker anger and resentment in Britain, Italy, Germany, the U.S. & other countries.
True, France needs to attract more investment & cut its jobless rate, but it has to be done in a politically palatable way. Macron utterly failed at that. By adopting policies that led to violence in the streets, Macron misfired & may have made France less attractive to investors
It's a matter of good sense, sequencing and sensitivity to what's happening to workers across France.
By the way, once upon a time, before I was a reporting covering labor and workplace matters, I was an economics correspondent in France for five years.
