A look back at when French protesters defeated government reform plans

The putrid smell of uncollected rubbish on Paris streets symbolises the acrid political struggle, after protests turned to unrest and a tussle turned into a crisis when Macron short-circuited parliament on March 16 to pass his pension reform.

Fortified by a majority of French public opinion, the unions show no sign of backing down.

It was easy to predict: a French president forces through changes to the social system and public fury erupts.

For all the talk of the power of la rue (the street) in French politics, several governments have overcome strikes and protests to enact reforms over recent decades – most notably when Nicolas Sarkozy’s government raised the retirement age from 60 to the current age of 62 back in 2010.

But for today’s protesters, the crises over pension reform in 1995 and labour law reform in 2006 are the history they want to repeat: in both instances, popular movements forced former president Jacques Chirac’s government to back down. 

>> Use of force signals ‘crisis of authority’ as France’s pension battle turns to unrest

The Unions’ 1995 victory

Months after Chirac entered the Élysée Palace, his first PM Alain Juppé proposed an overhaul of the social security system in November 1995 to raise people’s contributions while aligning public sector pension schemes with private sector ones.

The Juppé plan sparked massive strikes and protests – shutting down trains and the Paris metro for three weeks. The movement reached its apex on December 12 when colossal crowds took to the streets – 1 million according to the authorities, 2 million according to the unions. Then, as now, polls showed a majority of the French public backed the protests.

A crucial distinction between 1995 and the present crisis is that, back then, the government was in talks with the leadership of France’s largest – and most moderate – union, the CFDT, even if it provoked a bitter split within the union’s ranks and it ended up supporting the strikes. Similarly, Macron entered into talks with the CFDT during his first attempt at pension reform in late 2019 before he shelved it amid the Covid-19 pandemic. 

But now – in a sign of either intransigence or determination – Macron is not negotiating at all. As far as his government is concerned, the law has already been adopted and that’s that. Hence CFDT boss Laurent Berger warning Macron of spiralling unrest last week: “He must withdraw this reform before a catastrophe unfolds.” 

“If you’ve hacked off the CDFT, you really must have done something to upset them – they are, by definition, profoundly moderate,” said Paul Smith, a professor of French politics at Nottingham University. 

Chirac the ‘social Gaullist’

Chirac was a very different president from Macron. He spent his formative political years in the 1960s as the protégé of Georges Pompidou, then Charles de Gaulle’s prime minister. Many French not only revere de Gaulle as the leader of the Free French during World War II and the founding president of the Fifth Republic, they also admire his ideological mix of cultural conservatism and statist economics. Chirac was elected president in 1995 in the Gaullist mould – avowedly right-of-centre but promising to heal the economic inequality he lamented as the “fracture sociale” (broken society).

Macron has always been keen to burnish his Gaullist image, as he demonstrated by riding down the Champs-Élysées in a tank in his first term. But his liberal economic agenda marks a crucial distinction between his ideological stance and that of de Gaulle.

“It shouldn’t be forgotten that Chirac was a junior minister during the upheaval of 1968, and he was one of the ministers negotiating with unions at the Grenelle conference to resolve the crisis,” Smith noted. “One of the reasons why Chirac was so reticent about his successor Sarkozy is that he thought he was too liberal on the economy. Chirac always liked the idea of being a social Gaullist – so in 1995 he eventually backed down.”

The 2006 reforms were ‘just not worth it’

Eleven years later, Chirac backed down again. His then PM Dominique de Villepin introduced in January 2006 a plan to loosen the labour market for people under 26 in an attempt to reduce youth unemployment, a long-running problem in France. De Villepin proposed a special type of work contract for young people (those under 26) that allowed employers to dismiss them without giving a reason. This was a contentious measure, given that many in France cherish the system of tight job protections for those on contracts.   

Unlike the Juppé plan, de Villepin’s labour reform passed into law in February 2006. To avoid a parliamentary vote, Chirac used Article 49.3 – the Fifth Republic’s most controversial constitutional instrument, which Macron also used to get the current pension reforms through.

Despite its quick passage onto the statute books, many young French people did not accept the law. France saw huge demonstrations on February 7 and March 7 that year, with between 218,000 and 1 million people taking to the streets. Students occupied the Sorbonne for days. Then in the last week of March the movement spread beyond the youth, with broader-based protests bringing between 1 million and 3 million people out to demonstrate. 

Chirac made a U-turn on March 31, announcing in a televised address that the special contract for under-26s would not be put in place.

“Like 1995, 2006 was to do with Chirac,” Smith said. “To start with, he thought he had the ear of the French youth when he didn’t. But he decided not to enact the law even after it had got through. Chirac got a great deal of feedback from local MPs saying it wasn’t just schoolchildren and students opposed to his reform – it was their parents, too. And this came after his defeat in the referendum on the EU Constitution. So he decided it was just not worth it.”

Again, this highlights the contrast between Chirac’s approach and that of Macron. “There is a problem in the way the government is handling these current reforms; the lack of discussion with intermediary bodies,” Smith said. 

‘They want things to stay the same’

The example of 1995 demonstrates that keeping the public on side is the all-important factor for a movement to block reforms. And polls show opposition to Macron’s pension reforms has remained stable over recent weeks at around two-thirds of the French population – despite all the upheaval caused by the strikes and protests. Meanwhile, the most recent protests on Thursday gathered 3.5 million people across France, according to the hard-left CGT union, and 1 million according to the government.

For all the world’s transformations since Chirac’s presidency, the French attitude to the economy has not changed much.

“There has been a bit of movement; let’s not forget the pension age has gone up from 60 to 62. But there’s this sense that, by and large, the French are conservative – not meaning they are neoliberal but that they want things to stay the same. Most people are Keynesian, like the British Conservatives in the early post-war era,” as Smith put it.

Given this mindset, he concluded, the upheaval of the Covid era has only reinforced opposition to Macron’s pension reforms.

“There is a very strong sense of solidarity this time round. People are worn out. And this is after the pandemic told us not to kill ourselves working; that there are things in life beyond the workplace.”