Macron’s implicit business with Germany and the EU elites five years ago was that he would face a Thatcherite change, instilled by the cultural left.
It was to be a gallant variant of Gerhard Schröder’s Hartz IV agenda in the early 2000s, the reforms that drove Germany from a sick European to a lean competitor, with the help of a D brand. undervalued synthetic within the internal structure of the euro.
Professor Granville said the bet has failed. Macron has facilitated recruitment and dismissal, although its Nordic model of “flexible security” would not seem flexible to Danes. It has decentralized wage bargaining: companies are no longer so chained to unions that account for less than 8% of the workforce.
He has abolished the wealth tax, pleasing the financial elites who put him in power. “But it didn’t lower taxes on production, which is why (structural) unemployment is so high in France,” he said.
The suffocating bureaucracy and the bewildering nexus of overlapping bodies have not been touched for the most part. The plan to cut public payroll by 100,000 has been halted.
Macron’s big business involved pooling inherited debts in the EU and therefore shifting French obligations to Germany’s credit card, and here’s the problem. It secured Berlin’s consent for the joint issuance of debt for the 800 billion euro Pandemic Recovery Fund, but legally it was a one-time initiative.
The French calculation was that this fund would evolve into a Hamiltonian “fiscal entity” over time, according to the EU’s Monnet method of fluidity. This can still happen, but the fiscal setback and the prospect of a semi-ungovernable France over the next five years greatly lengthens the odds. “German (hard-line) ordoliberals are back,” Professor Granville said.
Macron prefers to ignore the election message. In an unpleasant speech, he reprimanded voters for the inconsistency, appearing to blame them for giving him a presidential mandate over what he called a clear political manifesto, and then failing to validate it with a parliamentary majority. But the French people did not choose him for their program. They voted to prevent Marine Le Pen and his National Rally from coming to power.