“The current wave of strikes and demonstrations has shown that there is plenty of fight among French workers and young people.”
Richard Price reports on the struggle against austerity and far right.
On 9th September, President Emmanuel Macron appointed his sixth prime minister in just over five years. The latest incumbent – Sébastien Lecornu, a member of Macron’s Renaissance party and a former member of Les Républicains – carries no more prospects of success than his predecessors, and who occupies the French premiership has become an increasingly desperate game of musical chairs.
Lecornu became premier following the fall of François Bayrou’s government after it lost a vote of confidence by 364 votes to 194 on 8th September, with both the parties of the left and the far right National Rally voting against. It was an ill-judged attempt to gather support for Bayrou’s 2026 budget proposal, which included €43.8bn of public spending cuts, a freeze on state pensions and on all government spending except for debt servicing and defence, and cutting two national holidays.
Lecornu’s honeymoon was cancelled on 10th September when France erupted in protests called by Bloquons tout (“Block everything”) – a new social movement mobilised in the preceding weeks on X, TikTok, Telegram and Facebook around the slogan “Boycott, disobedience and solidarity” and calling for a national shutdown and general strike. Even if these goals were over-ambitious, the protests nevertheless brought around 200,000 people onto the streets and included over 500 rallies across France.
Like the gilets jaunes protests in 2018-19, the movement has been built outside traditional political structures and the trade unions. Confusingly, the gilets jaunes were regionally disparate, and included people from both the left and the far right, while confronting a president claiming to be ‘neither right nor left’. And while their actions seriously undermined Macron’s credibility, they didn’t impact the rise of the far right.
While Bloquons tout shares the gilets jaunes’ contempt for Macron and the ‘political class’, and says it is not aligned to any political party, it more clearly faces left. Its demands include major investment in public services, an end to job cuts, and for the retention of all public holidays, as well as boycotting major retailers like Carrefour, Amazon and Auchan. Jean-Luc Mélenchon quickly declared his support; Marine Le Pen didn’t.
A survey conducted of 1,000 Bloquons tout supporters published on 1st September by the think-tank Fondation Jean-Jaurès found that 69% said they had voted for La France Insoumise’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the first round of the 2022 presidential election, with only 2% voting for Macron and 3% for Marine Le Pen.
On 18th September, it was the trade unions’ turn to mount a show of force, with a turnout estimated between 500,000 and 1 million, 250 rallies and strike action among train, bus and tram drivers, teachers and support staff, and hospital staff joining protests. Almost all pharmacies were closed as part of a protest against pricing policies. A number of secondary schools were blockaded by students, who joined the many demonstrations, the largest of which were in major cities including Paris to Marseille, Nantes, Lyon, Rennes and Montpellier. These more closely resembled the mass mobilisations against Macron’s pension reform in 2023.
So, where does this leave French politics? The National Assembly is locked in a three-bloc impasse. Macron could roll the dice again, dissolve the National Assembly and call fresh elections. But after his disastrous gamble calling elections last year, which saw the New Popular Front and the far-right National Rally both make substantial gains, he could simply make things even worse for himself.
Macron’s successive attempts to reshuffle the pack of centre-right politicians in recent years have all failed. Lecornu’s three predecessors were Gabriel Attal of Renaissance, Michel Barnier of Les Républicains and François Bayrou of the Democratic Movement. If this signifies anything, it is that the centre-right pond is becoming more crowded as it evaporates.
And yet Macronism – now without almost all of the centre left fringe that it originally attracted – is more than ever dependent on failed centre right politicians, all peddling variations of austerity. He won’t offer the premiership to a Socialist without the Socialist Party decisively breaking with the rest of the left, which under present conditions would probably amount to political suicide. So what we have is a kind of brittle political stasis.
Opinion polling in France is more complex than in many other countries. Because of the two-round system, pollsters are obliged to test various different run-off scenarios, and these in turn have only a limited relationship to the popularity of the various parties. In its latest poll of polls, Politico has the National Rally on 32%, the New Popular Front on 25%, Ensemble (the Macronite coalition) on 15%, and Les Républicains on 12%.
Even if you add 5% of ‘others’ to the left-wing column, the figures don’t make happy reading for the left. And they make grim reading for Macron. Any idea that he will accede to calls for his resignation from both the left and the far right (and apparently even echoed by a few in his own camp) looks even less likely. Although he is constitutionally unable to run in 2027, he is said to be eyeing up a third term in 2032. Inevitably, next March’s municipal elections will be seen as a dress rehearsal for the next presidential election.
Looming over all the political calculations is the gloomy state of the French economy. Although it shares sluggish growth with Britain, in other respects, there are significant differences between the two countries. French inflation is down and at 0.9% is lower than in Britain, but unemployment at 7.5% is substantially higher. France’s gross national debt is €3.3 trillion (or approximately $3.64 trillion), representing about 114% of its GDP. The comparable British figure is just over 100%.
Wealth inequality, meanwhile, has been steadily rising over the last two decades. According to the NGO coalition SDG Watch Europe: “There are now 8.8 million people below the poverty line, receiving a net income of less than €1,026 per month; two million people are living on less than €700 per month; nearly five million are receiving food aid; and over 200,000 are living on the street or in dwellings unfit for habitation.”
Bayrou’s solution was that “the entire nation has to work more”. The perception that French workers spend most of their time at lunch, on strike or on holiday is belied by our own Office for National Statistics analysis, which estimates that French productivity is 18% higher than British. What France lacks is not effort but – in common with other European countries – an effective means for taxing the very rich. The number of French billionaires has mushroomed from 12 in 2010 to 53 in 2025. French billionaires occupy first, third and ninth positions in the current EU rich list.
We are at yet another crossroads moment in French politics, but this time the stakes are higher. The current wave of strikes and demonstrations has shown that there is plenty of fight among French workers and young people. A far right victory in 2027 is far from inevitable. Unions have called a new day of strikes and demonstrations for 2nd October, supported by la France Insoumise, the Socialist Party, the Communist Party and the Greens following a meeting between the trade unions and Lecornu at which, according to the unions, he provided “no clear response” to workers’ demands. The political struggle to stop the National Rally must link up with the energy on the streets to be successful.
- Richard Price is a regular contributor to ‘Labour Outlook’ on France and other issues.
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