 I've had great pleasure to welcome Laura again. She's no stranger, of course, to this Institute. She's been here many times and every time she has brought a great enrichment to us of her extraordinary knowledge of France at this stage. She has knowledge of many places but of France in particular and she has worked in France for over 20 years. I think, reporting on France, and she is of course a chevalier de la lesion de neur in recognition of that fact. About the subject, we have looked on I think most of us at a country that we love and respect and have seen these attacks on its social fabric, on its democracy and on its economy. The economic factors are very big here at a time when President Macron was trying to get the finances in order and the deficit and so on. And we have wondered why are things so bad for working people in France that this is what they have to do following a hike in petrol prices, which we have all suffered from temporarily, and then a tax, a carbon tax, which maybe we should have a bit more of. And we have watched the social fabric of France really being challenged as never before, certainly not since 1968, this was more very different in 1968, this was a different type of people and so on. And we have watched the President Macron being under siege like I don't remember any other president in France and I'm sorry to say I've known most of them from a distance since Charles de Gaulle was a student in France at that time. And this is a man who a lot of us, and indeed a few of us have been meeting in a group called a French reflection group, talking about Macron, about the great things he could bring about for Europe. His speech at the Serban resonates with vision, with courage and insights and of course his incredible intelligence. But Macron is the one who has been personally attacked and personally weakened and personally wounded in all of this. And even I have watched him in October make a speech, this was after a terrible summer, don't forget that he has had several crisis, Minister for the Environment, a very top figure in France resigning, then an old socialist recruit, Colom resigning, and then the affair of Benalla which was extremely bizarre one has to say. So he was weakened by all of that but seemed to have recovered. And then there was the meeting in Paris which I thought would be terrific. The first world war centenary where again he met Macron and we could see the German flag oil irons coming together. But I'm afraid all of this recent thing has wounded him deeply. So Lara will be fascinating on this and we'll leave enough time for questions and answers because I have so many questions, but I won't talk to the mic. So Lara, it's great to see you again and looking so well and thank you very much for coming. A very short notice by the way. Thank you Jo, thank all of you for coming out on a Monday morning when the weather is fine and one would rather be walking around Dublin or something probably. But thank you Jo. I basically Jo said more and that's what I have. There's a lot of sort of draft here so I'm going to kind of go through it for about 15, 20 minutes and then open the floor up to questions. Yes, my feeling really very powerful feeling in recent weeks has been one of immense sadness because I love France like Jo and probably all of you. And I kept thinking back to that incredible high of the election night and Macron walking across the courtyard of the Louvre to the sound of Beethoven's Ode to Joy. And certainly at the time everyone pointed out this is the European hymn and there were European flags everywhere. There have been European flags at his rallies and so on. And joy, it was really about joy. You probably remember as well on his inauguration day, the way he wrote up the Champs-Élysées in the back of a command car. And Francois Hollande had this unfortunate habit of seeming to attract rain clouds and everywhere he went it just rained and rained and rained and rained. And it was a rainy day for the inauguration and the moment that Macron walked out of the Élysées palace and headed for the Champs-Élysées the clouds parted and the sun came out. And the Irish context is one of the best titles they ever put on one of my reports. A front page headline was with a photograph of Macron standing proudly was by Jupiter the sun always shines on Macron. I thought it was really lovely. And then it was sort of like a flash forward 19 months to November or December. And Macron has a sort of hunted look in his eyes. That look in his eyes has actually changed. When he went to survey the damage when he came back from the G7 or G20, I can't remember. G20 in Argentina. He was booed and kissed by Gilles Dejeun by the crowd. And then again there was a very dramatic incident where he went to a prefecture in the Loire that had been burned down with the prefect and his family still in the building. The Gilles Dejeun set fire to it. And I know because I'm on the board of the Presidential Press Association that journalists were furious because he snuck out of the Élysées without notifying anyone. He went without a press pool or anything. And he tried to reach out to people as he came out of the prefecture after a meeting there. He rolled down the window of the car and again he was hissed and booed. So there is this incredible hatred person and it's very, very personal. A lot of the graffiti is obscene words. Macron, Macron, Louis says. Macron, démission. That is their one slogan over and over again. Macron, design. So Macron, I think one doesn't know how he's feeling personally, he hasn't told me. But he gave the impression of just hunkering down in the Élysées Palace. So he's just going into high, going to ground. And one didn't hear anything from him for about ten days until that night of December 10th when he made his speech. And to me the one line that really struck me in that speech was like a confession or an admission. He talked about the distress of the most disadvantaged French people and he said, open quote, it doesn't date from yesterday but we got used to it in a cowardly manner and at the end of the day things went on as if they, that is to say the poor, the disadvantaged, as if they were erased and forgotten. So he's admitting that he didn't see them. And I thought that this ooblee was really tragic because in his book very accurately, presciently named Autobiographical Manifesto Révolution published in 2016, he wrote about peripheral France. I'm sure you're all familiar with the term peripheral France, la France périferique, which was coined by Christophe Guili, a geographer. And it's all about people who live not even in the banlieu but beyond the banlieu in sort of rural France or they call them rural ban who rely excessively on their cars because they have to commute, because there are no more post offices or schools or dispensaries or whatever they need near their home so they have to have cars. And he wrote about the lack of basic infrastructure in rural France. He talked also, the other big factor in this revolt has been what Macron called the visceral attachment to equality. Egalite is not one of these three basic words for nothing. I mean it is really, really strong feeling. Whereas I think in English speaking countries people who succeed are seen more as sort of models and people, you know, we want to emulate them, we all want to get rich and famous and whatever. In France there's just incredible resentment towards people who do get rich. Anyway, he talked about this attachment to equality. He said that digital technology, and I quote him, cruelly reveals social injustice, the differences in standards of living. It shows the poorest how the rich live which can feed frustration or even revolt. So he wrote this two years before it happened. I think that's exactly what happened because France invented luxury and especially when you go to Paris, you know it's just so in your face. And these people who cannot afford designing clothes or foie gras or whatever, they see this constantly and they see it a lot on television. So that was also a big factor. So two years before this happened there was no one who diagnosed the problem. And yet his administration seems to have had a fixation about the automobile, about cars. They required not one MOT test for older cars, but two MOT tests. And so it means you had to pay for them twice. Edward Shiedeep, the Prime Minister, lowered the speed limit from 90 to 80 kilometres an hour on three roads, saying that it would reduce road fatalities and so on. That infuriated these people because, you know, time is precious, whatever. And they started sabotaging the radars because the government also stepped up the number of traffic tickets. Half of the traffic radars in France are now dysfunctional or not working. It's a pretty successful campaign of sabotaging traffic radars. And then the carbon tax, which Joe mentioned, three cents on petrol per litre, six cents on diesel. And that was sort of the last straw. And I was reminded many times by people I interviewed in recent weeks that tax was basically the root cause of the 1789 revolution. There are so many similarities. I mean, you may have seen two days ago, a lot of the women demonstrators were dressing up as Marianne in the symbol of the French Revolution. The mayors of small towns now have set up a nationwide practice of cahier de doléance. These are the registries of complaints where people go into the merry and write what they're angry about. And so these are being gathered up just as it happened in 1789. Another sort of little sign of this is a lot of the demonstrators were these Phrygian bonnets, you know, the caps like they did in 1789. And, of course, Macron being compared to Louis XVI all the time. And I couldn't help remembering the first time I met Macron was in 2013 he was an adviser to Francois Hollande, and the Presidential Press Associates invited him to lunch. And I'd never heard of a guy before. And frankly, I wasn't that impressed. I just thought, you know, another bright young man, overeducated, you know, the same thing. But he said that the one quote that I never forgot, and I went back to my notebook when he was elected and found it, he said the French elected president to be a monarch and then they want to cut his head off. And I can't think of a better summary of what has happened in the last month. Now, the whole president of the rich moniker, and this is something that has really hurt him is something one has heard since the first summer after his election. It basically goes back to three acronyms. APL, the APL, which is the basic housing allowance, which Macron increased, he decreased it. He took five euro a month out of everybody's housing allowance. That was in the very early stages of his presidency and that raised a huge protest. The CSA, which is the Social Security Tax, he raised the CSA for old age pensioners. And the argument, I thought, had a lot of, you know, made sense. I got this from his economic advisers. I don't think he ever formulated quite this clearly, but our generation, and everyone in their sort of 60s, 70s, the baby boom generation was the luckiest generation of all time. They had free education, free medical care, full employment for a long time, job security, and these people in their 60s, 70s, 80s are sitting on massive savings. Most of them own their own homes and they have all this money in the bank. And so Macron's feeling was, and sometimes this has felt like a generational conflict as well between his generation and ours, he said they should pay. There must be solidarity between generations because young people now don't have all these things that we have. So that was a rationale behind it, but it went down like a lead balloon. And I know a lot of people, pensioners who voted for Macron, he was very popular among senior citizens who now really dislike him because their CSA, their Social Security Tax, went up. And then, of course, the final one, which the left calls his original sin, was the ESF, which is the wealth tax you're probably all familiar with. The old ESF was on capital and poverty. And he basically just did away with the capital part. There's a flat tax now. If you have money on the books, you just pay a flat tax. I think it's 30%, but it's still a lot less. It's confiscatory before. And he did that in the first months of his presidency. And I have heard that everywhere I've gone, I've heard it in Amiens, in his hometown. It's the ESF, the ESF, the ESF. And the Giregion want that tax reinstated. And Macron, of course, in his speech on December 10th, his televised address said, no, I'm not going to reinstate the ISF because it's a disincentive to investment in France. We've had it for four years. And money keeps leaving the country and people are not going to invest in France when you take all their money away from them, all their profits away from them. So those are also... Basically, I'm going through the reasons why this happened. And I'll talk afterwards about how badly I think he is damaged. The demonstration on Saturday makes me think that it's probably over. I was listening to French Radio this morning and Eric Cioti, who is one of the leading members of the Leru Pubblicant Conservative Party, said, no, it doesn't mean it's over at all. It could start up again any moment, probably after Christmas, he thinks it's going. I don't think so. I think that once you've lost, they're down to 66,000 demonstrators for the whole country. And they had almost 300,000 the first week. And it's less than half what it was the previous week. One can ask what are the factors that mean it's subsided. I think there are probably three main factors. Macron actually gave them an awful lot on December 10. First of all, even several days before that, he rescinded the rise in fuel costs in petrol and diesel. That was the initial main demand. He's given a 100 euro per month rise in minimum wage, which is going up from, I can't remember exactly, it's about 1400 euro a month to about 1500 euro a month, which is a 6% rise in minimum wage. He's also made overtime, and this was a measure that Nicolas Sarkozy had done that was very popular and I think Hollande reversed it, but overtime hours now will not be taxed, nor there will be social charges on overtime. He's asked big companies to give year-end bonuses, which will also be tax-free. He has brought forward the end of the tax deduction, this habitation tax for anyone who has a dwelling rented or owned on January 1 of every year. That is going to end completely. Am I forgetting it? I think that's about it, but this represents 10 billion euro in Spain, which is huge and which will, of course, put France over the 3% budget deficit ceiling, which we'll come back to. He gave them an awful lot. I think also the terrorist attack in Strasbourg last week probably dampened the G-Dasions spirits for two reasons. One, the government called on them to stop demonstrating out of solidarity with the country. It's like, why would you weaken your country when it's under attack from Islamists? Also, I think there's a fear of being in a demonstration, being in a crowd and having a suicide bomber or murder with an assault weapon or whatever. There's a fear of actually being caught in an attack, but that's a two-edged disincentive. Also, the weather's got bad and Christmas is coming. I think all of those factors played a role. After Macron's speech, there were two schools of thought. One is we've created this huge wreckage and it's worked. We've done very well, let's stop. The other argument is we've created havoc and it's working, let's keep going. It did divide the movement. People like Jacqueline Moreau, who was one of the original G-Dasions. She's a beautician and what do you call it? A medium who had done a video that went viral against Macron. Very vulgar, actually, if I say so. She's kind of saying, ah, I know. She's just right. Six or seven minutes right, but 600,000 people watch this video. She's become a sort of leading figure. The social media effect is incredible. I was at a lunch with Sylvain Thaw, who is head of communications for Macron. At the very early stages of the revolt, he said, this Jacqueline Moreau who pulls spirits out of her fingertips. I wrote this in the Irish Times for giving me a recording myself, but I said it was like sitting next to the powdered marquee and she was the Jacobean with the Frigian and Bonnet. You really felt that historical, that activism coming back. Going back to the causes of the revolt, I'm trying to read my own notes here. One thing that's pointed out often is that Macron is a victim of a movement that is actually quite similar to what he did. It's a sort of unidentified political object. Nobody's ever seen a movement like this in France before. Neither left nor right, totally disruptive, wanting to overturn the established order. So in a sense, the Gisle genre just repeating what he did with Enmarche a couple of years ago. I think this fall from grace probably really, the thing that sort of tripped it off was Alessandro Benalla, the bodyguard who Joe mentioned. It's interesting that he's actually been placed under investigation over the weekend for a second incident which happened on the same day on May 1 where he beat up, we didn't know about this before, but when they plant, there was a great, what they call an arrestation musclé, where they kind of grabbed some guys and hit them and he is accused of impersonating a policeman in that instance as well, as well as the two who we also have a video of. But Macron really felt to grasp how bad that looked. The 80s, it was completely silent for five days after the story broke on July 17. I think that was a huge mistake and it also, there was nothing else going on. So with the 24-hour news cycle, it was just over and over and constantly on the radio, on television and so on. As Joe said, again, the resignations of Nicolas Hulot at the end of August and some JR Cologne at the beginning of October were extremely damaging. Cologne in particular had given several press interviews where he said Macron doesn't listen to anyone anymore, he's arrogant, this sort of thing. When you have one of your first supporters saying these sorts of things, and then both of them actually resigned without forewarning. Usually when you resign from a high government position, and these two men were, I think, third and fourth ranking in the cap, no, second and third, they were top ranking ministers, they showed total disrespect for Macron by resigning by Hulot on the radio and Cologne in an interview with Le Figaro and not even warning him in advance that they were leaving his government. And as I've said, the social media, the 24-hour news cycle, also magnifies everything. Macron has a favourite phrase, he talks about les premiers décordés, which is, I've looked for a good translation in English, I think it's a lead climber when you have a rope and climbers on a rope. And he always talks about how the lead climbers must not be dragged down, how France doesn't appreciate them enough, doesn't help them, and he praises these people and says that they're really necessary. This has been seen from the beginning as a justification of privilege. So every time he tries to explain it, it just gets worse and people just go, they've got this sort of tunnel vision that he loves the rich and the privilege. There's also, for example, he talks about France as a start-up nation, and this somehow grates on a lot of his opponents as well. They don't like English language terms, for one thing. So that hurts him. And then there have been the gaffes. There are not that many, maybe six or eight, and actually in almost every instance what he said, I believe, was true. But again, la petite croise becomes a huge issue. There was, and this is just the last six months, I mean there were more before that, but remember he said that France, this was actually in a meeting at the Eise, and the video was put on social media by his own staff. He said, France spends, I quote, a crazy amount of dough and people are still poor. He was talking about the social spending, which is the highest in the OECD, which is the highest, yes it is the highest in the EU, 56% of French GDPs in the public sector, about a third of it goes for social programs and social welfare and people are still poor because they wouldn't have done this revolt if they weren't. So he was absolutely right, but that caused a scandal because he used the word pognon dough, which was seen as somehow rude or something. Then there was the incident where the young man addressed him when he was out on the Hastings and said, called him Tu, the familiar form, and he called it Manu, which is short for Emmanuel of course, a Macron lecture him and he said, you call me Mr President or Sir. And this again, he was right, it was rude and so on and so forth, but I would have liked to have seen him handle it with a sense of humour and lightness of touch. De Gaulle was very good at that. You might remember once De Gaulle was at a rally and someone shouted, Marocon! And De Gaulle said, Vestu po rhan. I think if Macron could master that sort of repost it would really help him. Another, and this one, I thought it was totally unfair. He was in, I believe he was in Copenhagen on a state visit and he said that the French were goals, de Gaulle were, I guess I think he could translate it as goals, goals, goals, resistant to change, refactor au changement au progrès, whatever. And that caused a storm. You know, and you would think that people who dislike Donald Trump and who see all the rude things that he says every single day would be a little bit less judgmental about this sort of thing. And then there's just sort of image problems. You might remember when he was in the West Indies a year after that terrible storm that killed a couple dozen people and so on. And he posed, well actually he wasn't really posing when somebody thought of it with an iPhone. There were two young men, one naked from the waist up and the other one, and he was giving a finger to the camera and the other one with a big gold chain and a white shirt had just got out of prison. And Macron sort of lectured him about now you behave yourself and you look after your mother and this sort of thing. But that photograph of Macron with these two West Indian shops and the background one of them with shirtless that really upset a lot of people. It's upset. Marine Le Pen, he tweeted about it and it upset a lot of elderly people who tend to be more conservative and who were already angry about this ASG as I mentioned. And there was also another one which was true, but again very unfortunate it was on Heritage Day, le jour du patrioen when Macron and Brigitte let people come visit the Elysée Palace and he actually went out to talk to them. And he's always criticized for being distant and cold and this sort of thing. He made the effort and the gesture of going and talking to the people who come to the Elysée Palace and there was a 25 year old man who said I trained as a horticulturist and I can't find any work. And Macron said well actually there's a lot of work in France everywhere I go employers complain to me that they can't fill jobs and there are of course plenty of jobs in hotels, restaurants and construction to do those jobs. Macron said unfortunately I can cross the street and find your job. Je traverses la rue et je vous trouve du travail. And that also caused a whole nother week of Scandal. So the poor guy no matter what he says he's pillering for it. I think that all of these incidents might have passed might have been forgotten if the Macron had the economic results but growth economic growth in France remains very slow unemployment remains very high it's still over 9% and taxes keep going up and public services keep diminishing so people are very unforgiving. And I think he thinks that his policies will give results but it's been too slow in coming. So now because of the riots he has realised that he has to give tangible improvements fast and the hope is that this 10 billion euro that he's spending will do that but the stimulus will actually work. I went through the measures a little earlier I think that it will be very interesting to see how this plays out with the EU because already the Italian government is saying ah well how come France can violate the the stability and growth pact and we cannot and they're actually not even there they just have a really enormous debt will the Germans hold it against him that he's no longer showing this financial rigor that he promised probably but I think it will draw France closer to more left-leaning people in the European Parliament parties in Europe Joe also mentioned the September 2017 speech at the Solban and he did promise in that speech that France would share the way by reforming its own economy he said we were not incredible unless we did this ourselves and indeed he made two very important reforms in his first year in office. He reformed the labour code and he also reformed the SNCF the railway company and these are things that many of his predecessors had wanted or tried to do and just gave up and weren't able to do it and Macron did it with some protest but nothing on the scale of the GB Joan so now the question is can he continue reforming and there are two very important reforms coming up the unemployment system which France has the most generous benefits of any country I have a friend of my own age who is earning more unemployment than I am working for the Irish Times and she is actually earning more than she did when she was employed so he is trying to reform the unemployment system and also the pension system because there are 42 different pension regimes in France and he wants that to be streamlined he wants one pension system for everybody can he do this or at least another six months or so he will not dare to take any measures or even propose anything that will cause any economic pain because the last thing he wants is for people to go back into the street his ability to make our planet great again in Crusade is also very impaired because he had a carbon tax and he cancelled it so I don't know where that's going to go I heard Brune Poisson who's the Deputy Minister for Ecology on the radio yesterday or today and she was wanting all the measures that they're taking saying that they're still leading the fight against climate change so maybe they can Next May's EU elections are the first big test of all this Macron of course had portrayed it as a contest between progressives and nationalists he being progressive and people like Marine Le Pen and Victor Orban and Matteo Salvini being the nationalists unfortunately for Macron the polls will show that Le Pen's party which is now called the Rassemblement National the RN will come in first they won the last European elections about 25% of the vote then and that will be a blow to Macron if that happens it's interesting that the Gilles Déjeun although they are not a political party and they don't really have any clearly identified leaders polls show that they will get 12% in EU elections if they happen now and between Marine Le Pen and Nicolas Dupont in Young who was her running mate in the presidential election and the Gilles Déjeun they have almost 50% of the vote which is frightening so another interesting aspect of all this is that the foreign leaders who Macron has criticized to my mind with good reason they have reveled in this whole thing Donald Trump for example after the let me see it must have been the December 8th riots said that it proved that the Paris climate accord was not working and they were rioted over a carbon tax and that they didn't want it and so on Matteo Salvini said Macron is no longer a problem for me or for Europe is a problem for the French the Iranian Foreign Ministry warned the French government to quote stop violence against its own people Vladimir Putin and Vegeta Tayyup Erdogan also made very similar statements Erdogan warned of the wave of terrorist attacks across France and this was before the Strasbourg attack one thing I was very worried about when the riots were going on was that there could be a crisis on several fronts at the same time because you had a popular revolt I thought please don't let there be any terrorist attacks we have that not sure if it helped to end the riots or not but that can happen again it can happen today tomorrow and the third thing is the banlieu the immigrant suburbs have actually been very quiet now people I know who have witnessed these horrible acts of vandalism claim that basically what happens is if you have three ways you have first the ideologs who come in and talk about social justice and equality and so on then you have the sort of anarchists who come in and start breaking windows and destroying things and then you have the looters and I have been told repeatedly and sometimes minutes after it happened that the looters are coming from the banlieu so there's like three groups that have their role but the banlieu has been very quiet and they have not joined forces with the gilets jaunes but those are the three potential fronts that Macron is facing Macron said and I think he's right that this is a historic turning point in his administration in French history as well and he promised he said we will not resume the normal course of our lives as we have done too often in the past in similar crises without changing anything without anything having been truly understood or truly changed and I think he meant it and I think it took three or four weeks to really sink in the seriousness of this crisis and the depth of dissatisfaction among people he said that the anger of the yellow vest could prove salutary and I think he's right about that as well it's unfortunate that seven people have been killed always in accidents at barricades basically it's very unfortunate that people died that hundreds of millions of euro in economic damage has been done but it seems that this is the only way for change to happen in France is very dramatic violent revolts and Macron has realized that he is well actually it was Jean-Luc Le Drian the foreign minister who said that Macron had put too much emphasis on competitiveness and not enough on fairness and his administration has now definitely turned leftward there will be much more social policy much more concern about equality and standard of living of people and less concern about those rich investors and bringing them back from Brussels and London if Macron comes out of this crisis having learned how to govern better and governing France is never an easy task he may actually be more credible he may rebound I think there is probably no statement in the world who hasn't faced deep crisis but and I talked to Jean-Luc Le Drian who is a friend and prominent historian in France and he wrote a book about Macron and his historic context he said that if you look back on the French revolutions and these aren't all of them but the 1789 1848 1871 1968 in all of those instances they were followed by a right wing backlash and the thing that the yellow vest revolt has shown is that you could have a coalition of the dissatisfied ranging from extreme left to extreme right this sort of mixed bed quite similar to the Cinque Stelle in Italy that they could actually something like that could change totally the political situation could actually even come to power and if Macron fails and we really are at that point where we don't know I think that the extremist will definitely be the beneficiary Questions?