Something odd has happened to French President Emmanuel Macron since the Coronavirus hit France, writes Joe Lauria.
For the first three years of his presidency, Emmanuel Macron of France has been the very symbol of austerity and neoliberalism: in every way the bankers’ president.....MORE
Coming from an investment bankers’ background at Rothschild & Co., and fully backed by the money-men, Macron captured the presidency in May 2017. He set out to complete the move towards the Anglo-Saxon model that French leaders had tried to hinder until Nicolas Sarkozy took the reins in May 2007.
Sarkozy commenced with undoing the French social contract, partially revoking the inheritance tax, reducing taxes on the rich, deregulating business and beginning the attack on the 35-hour work week.
Macron was supposed to finish the job. Until he suspended his free-market “reforms” last month in the midst of the Coronavirus crisis, he was ruthlessly taking on labor unions and pensioners in a relentless drive to further “modernize” France in favor of bankers and corporate boardrooms, sparking massive street protests.
But something strange has happened since the Coronavirus hit France. An apparent humanity buried deep inside the French president has suddenly emerged—and let the bankers be damned.
In an interview on Thursday with the Financial Times, Macron talked about economics as a “moral science” and said European debt should be mutualized, meaning northern Europeans should be on the hook for southern debt—or face the wrath of right-wing populists.
He said the European Union was not just a market but was really about human beings. In other words, he was calling for state intervention in the economy, going against everything he has heretofore believed. “We are all embarking on the unthinkable,” he said.
“We are at a moment of truth, which is to decide whether the European Union is a political project or just a market project,” he said. “I think it’s a political project . . . We need financial transfers and solidarity, if only so that Europe holds on.”
An Existential Event
The French president said he sees the crisis as “an existential event for humanity that will change the nature of globalization and the structure of international capitalism,” the newspaper reported. “In recent years [globalization] increased inequalities in developed countries,” he admitted. “And it was clear that this kind of globalisation was reaching the end of its cycle, it was undermining democracy.”
Macron told the FT:
“We are going to nationalise the wages and the P&L [the financial accounts] of almost all our businesses. That’s what we’re doing. All our economies, including the most [economically] liberal are doing that. It’s against all the dogmas, but that’s the way it is.
“I believe [the EU] is a political project. If it’s a political project, the human factor is the priority and there are notions of solidarity that come into play . . . the economy follows on from that, and let’s not forget that economics is a moral science.”
And from UnHerd:
Will rural France recover from Covid?
In the tiny village of La Roche, conversation was the first victim of Macron's lockdown
Nobody talks in rural France anymore. We just shuffle silently to our cars, or around Intermarché, where the check-out staff, as well as wearing latex gloves and masks, stand behind the sort of glass screens you get in banks. Should you encounter, by chance, a neighbour, you wave from a distance along the aisle. Assuming, that is, they do not flee. Assuming, too, that you recognise them behind their home-made mask.
Paranoia regarding la peste is palpable. Life here becomes a little less normal each and every day. Yesterday — or was it the day before? I have lost track of time — M. Jacques, who runs the tabac in the local town, installed a one-way system, improvised from the tables no-one is allowed to sit at anymore. His grey-faced coughing, though, I believe is the consequence of Camels not Covid-19.
I don’t smoke, or at least I didn’t, but I’ve taken to puffing at cigars in desperation at the ennui of house arrest since Macron addressed the nation to announce, “Nous somme en guerre!” Channelling Napoleon (complete with widow’s-peak hair), he then shut down the entire country with four hours notice to the strains of La Marseillaise. Was that the 17th March? I have lost track of time.
Anyway, until Napoleon Macron’s declaration we in France profonde had been blissfully blasé about coronavirus. After his orotundity on TV there was panic buying at our local Inter. The French plundered the demi-sel butter. The bit of shelf reserved for ‘Nos Amis, Les Anglais’ was stripped of Heinz baked beans....See also David Keohane's work at the FT's Paris outpost, a small selection:
Eurozone’s two biggest economies sink into historic recessions
