Mr Macron’s tacit deal with Germany and EU elites five years ago was that he would ride out Thatcher’s shake-up, sweetened by cultural leftism.
It was supposed to be a Gallic version of Gerhard Schröder’s Hartz IV program in the early 2000s, the reforms that turned Germany from Europe’s sick man into a weak competitor with the help of the undervalued synthetic D mark in the euro’s internal structure.
Professor Granville said the gamble had failed. Mr Macron has made it easier to hire and fire, although his Scandinavian model of “flexible security” will not seem flexible to the Danes. It decentralizes wage bargaining: firms are no longer so tied to unions, which make up less than 8 percent of the workforce.
He abolished the wealth tax, pandering to the financial elites who put him in power. “But he didn’t cut taxes on production, which is why (structural) unemployment is so high in France,” she said.
The suffocating bureaucracy and confusing nexus of overlapping bodies is almost untouched. A plan to cut government wages by 100,000 was shelved.
Mr Macron’s grand deal involves consolidating legacy EU debts and therefore transferring French liabilities to Germany’s credit card, and therein lies the problem. He did secure Berlin’s agreement to issue joint debt for the €800 billion Pandemic Recovery Fund, but legally it was a one-off initiative.
The French calculation was that this fund would evolve into a Hamiltonian “fiscal entity” over time, via Monet’s method of the EU creep system. That could still happen, but the fiscal rollback and the prospect of a semi-ungovernable France for the next five years greatly increase the odds. “The German ordoliberals (hardliners) are back,” Prof Granville said.
Mr Macron prefers to ignore the message of the election. In a fiery speech, he blasted voters for inconsistency, appearing to blame them for giving him a presidential mandate based on what he called a clear political manifesto and then failing to endorse it with a parliamentary majority. But the French people did not choose him for his program. They voted to stop Marine Le Pen and her National Association from gaining power.
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