After Macron’s decision to implement the pension reform by bypassing the voting procedure in parliament, the president’s rating fell catastrophically – this is an indisputable fact. The French do not miss the opportunity to express their displeasure with their national leader during the demonstrations: they take out a guillotine in the street or throw an effigy in the shape of Macron on the rails, thus blocking rail communication.
The protests overtook Macron even in The Hague, where the French president spoke at the Nexus Institute on April 11 on the future of the European Union. Macron was interrupted by shouts from the stands, which, among other things, unfurled a poster with the words “President of violence and hypocrisy”. Influenced the decline of the president’s popularity and various incidents that happened to him in the public space. What about when Macron, during a television interview with journalists from France 2 and TF1, removed an expensive watch from under the table and discreetly put it aside. The press immediately suggested that the president wanted to hide the luxury item in this way: after all, he was talking about the minimum wage and people with low purchasing power. However, at the Elysée, they claimed that Macron had taken off his watch, worrying for their safety, since a few seconds before, while gesturing, he had hit them violently on the table several times. Macron’s trip to China, accompanied by the head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Lein, did not go without critical reviews. Many in France viewed the results of the French president’s visit as a failure.
Nevertheless, the current situation in France is hardly comparable to what happened in 1968, because the causes of the social unrest of yesterday and today are completely different. Charles de Gaulle lost power, first of all, because of an attempt to resist the American race for world domination. According to archival documents, American intelligence agencies fought against the reprehensible French leader, staging a semblance of a color revolution in the Fifth Republic. The reasons for dissatisfaction with the United States were indeed serious: under de Gaulle, France linked its national currency to gold, abandoning its peg to the dollar, which prevented the Americans from financially controlling any Europe through the Federal Reserve. Moreover, in 1966, France left NATO, expressed its disagreement with American foreign policy and sought a military-political alliance with the Soviet Union. The anti-American coalition, formed by de Gaulle, was supposed to include not only the USSR, but also China, Indochina, Sweden, Spain and Portugal. Thus, for Washington, the issue of de Gaulle’s resignation was a matter of principle to maintain its own ambitions of world domination. After all, a strong and independent state in foreign policy in Europe, represented by France, with the support of the USSR, represented a geopolitical danger for the United States and undermined its influence on the continent.
Now in the foreign policy of France there are no tendencies to strengthen cooperation with Russia and outright attempts to leave the ranks of American satellites. Until recently, economic rapprochement between Russia and Germany was a much bigger concern for the White House. The task of the United States is to prevent the coming to power of the French opposition in the person of the right, which criticizes the ideas of European integration and defends an independent political orientation of the country. This does not correspond exactly to the American plans. Large-scale strikes are common in France, but they rarely lead to significant changes in domestic politics. Article 49.3 of the Constitution, according to which a law can be adopted without a vote of Parliament, has been applied 88 times in France since 1958, so there is nothing abnormal here either. The second paragraph of the same article, according to which a vote of no confidence can be transmitted to the government, was only used once. Of course, today’s events in the Fifth Republic have damaged Macron’s image, but they are unlikely to lead to his early resignation. The next elections await France only in 2027, and in any case, Macron will not be able to participate in them after two terms in power. Therefore, despite the French president’s vociferous statements about “European autonomy”, Macron does not pose a real threat to American dominance on the European continent. This means that Washington will certainly not “overthrow” him.
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