Macron Blinks

A little bit of good news over the weekend: Emmanuel Macron flinched (see Adam Nossiter's "Macron Scraps Proposal to Raise Retirement Age in France"); he agreed to remove the requirement that French workers retire at the age 64:

On Saturday, with a crippling transport strike already in its sixth week, Mr. Macron’s government backed down, announcing that it would “withdraw” the new age limit, and put off decisions on financing the system until it gets a report on the money problem “between now and the end of April.”

But the government did not entirely rule out the idea of reintroducing a new retirement age if funding solutions to the pensions deficit are not reached.

And the government’s concession is unlikely to end either the strike or the demonstrations. The more militant unions — and the ones most heavily represented in the railways and the Paris subway — are demanding that Mr. Macron abandon his entire reform plan.

The demand in the streets Saturday was for precisely that. The mood was militant, and the more violent demonstrators once again clashed with the police, even as they sowed a trail of damage through eastern Paris. A bank branch was sacked, and bus shelters smashed and fires set. Unions said 150,000 protesters were in the streets of Paris on Saturday.

Macrons concession seems designed to split the unions:

The moderate French Democratic Confederation of Labor, or CFDT, which has long been calling for the withdrawal of the new retirement age, welcomed the government’s move on Saturday, which it said had shown “the government’s willingness to compromise.”

The French have taken to the streets in huge numbers week after week. Macron remains enormously unpopular. The problem is the French presidential election is more than two years off and Macron controls the National Assembly.

Macron was placed in the presidency to "modernize" the French political economy, which has meant bringing it in closer alignment with the zombie neoliberal Washington Consensus, something he has done with aplomb despite more than a year of social unrest, first with the Yellow Vests protests and now with the month-plus general strike.

Macron is like Trump, a political extremist whose presidency is based on the sine qua non of a handful of policies. For Macron, that includes the destruction of France's excellent pension system; for Trump, war on Iran.

I think the French are less likely to block Macron than Americans are to block Trump. Trump will continue to wage war on Iran prior to this November's presidential election, but it will be a covert, shadow war. The downing of the Ukrainian 737 has delivered an unexpected PSYOP bonanza for the Trump administration which will keep the Western mainstream media and Langley busy for months.

With Bernie Sanders well positioned to deal a blow to the DNC, a question that remains unanswered is the lengths to which the Democratic Party establishment is willing to go to tomahawk his candidacy.

There's an argument, based on the outcome of the December general election in the United Kingdom, that the best bet for neoliberal-dominated party would be to allow Sanders to capture the nomination and then make sure he loses the general election in a landslide, like Corbyn lost to Johnson. That way you can swab the decks of all those pesky Democratic Socialists and Justice Democrats post-November.