How Macron Can Save His Presidency

On the evening of March 23, protesters set ablaze the historic town hall of Bordeaux, France. Months of mostly peaceful demonstrations against the French government’s pension reform bill had hit a violent inflection point. That same day, more than one million people took to the streets nationwide. In Paris, which saw a turnout of some 119,000, street battles erupted between police forces and masked demonstrators. Officers were pelted with Molotov cocktails as they sprayed tear gas at the rioters, creating a haze of fumes that blanketed the city.

The pension reform bill that has provoked such ire will raise France’s public retirement age from 62 to 64 by 2030. To many foreign onlookers, protesters’ outrage about this apparently minor tweak may seem extreme or misplaced. As life expectancy in France has risen, so too has the stress on its generous pension system. Supporters of the reform—chief among them French President Emmanuel Macron—argue that it is necessary to keep the system afloat. Only in France, some might snark, could the demand to give up some leisure time provoke such fierce backlash.

But the flames in Bordeaux were fanned by much more than the legislation text itself. While the pension reform is opposed by more than two-thirds of French citizens, the mechanism Macron used to enact it is even more unpopular. Anticipating the bill’s defeat in Parliament, Macron invoked a special provision in the French constitution that allows the government to bypass the legislative body and pass bills without a vote.

While the provision—known as Article 49.3—falls within the president’s constitutional powers, it is fundamentally undemocratic. In no other Western democracy can the president pass major laws without legislative approval; not even executive orders in the United States carry the same degree of legal authority. Eighty-two percent of the French public disapproves of Macron’s use of Article 49.3—including a majority of those voters who supported him in the first round of the 2022 presidential election.

Protestors are calling for the government’s resignation. If Macron has any hope of resuscitating his government, he must change how he governs—and include more citizens in his decision-making rather than circumventing their concerns.

On both occasions, aggrieved citizens revolted against policies they viewed as unfair, a system they viewed as undemocratic, and an elite they viewed as out of touch. Protests against Macron’s pension reform have even repurposed an anthem popularized by the yellow vests: “On est là” (“We are here”). Like the yellow vests, today’s demonstrators contend that the brunt of the pension reform’s consequences will fall on those already most disadvantaged by France’s labor system. Their demands for recognition and agency reflect the real ways democracy is falling short not only in France but across the Western world.

In a 2014 study conducted in the United States, political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page found that economic elites and business interests had an outsized influence on public policy, whereas average citizens had little to no independent influence. There have been similar findings in 30 European countries. In many so-called democracies, decision-making power has become increasingly relegated to a select few, and policies have fallen out of step with the public as a result.

Macron’s invocation of Article 49.3 is a particularly egregious example of the obstruction of people power, but these trends have been building under the surface for the past several decades. It is little surprise, then, that when Macron failed to consult citizens on his pension reform, he crafted a hugely unpopular policy that led to hundreds of thousands of citizens storming the streets.

In her biographical account of Macron’s ascent to the Élysée, Revolution Française: Emmanuel Macron and the Quest to Reinvent a Nation, journalist Sophie Pedder describes how Macron entered office with an ambitious vision to “modernize” the country’s economy. For Pedder and many of Macron’s cosmopolitan supporters, the policies that have triggered intense public backlash are precisely the ones that are required to update France for the 21st century. In 2018, the proposed fuel tax was part of Macron’s mission to reduce carbon; the pension reform this year seeks to accommodate rising life expectancy and address France’s looming budget crisis.

But for the public, the ends don’t justify the means; and the means themselves are an important part of the process. The yellow vests were not protesting the goal of fighting climate change, but rather the inequitable policies the government chose to achieve that goal. The same goes for today’s anti-pension reform demonstrators.

Macron is not the first French president to invoke Article 49.3. The clause dates back to Charles de Gaulle and the establishment of the Fifth Republic in 1958. Article 49.3 has been used on 100 different occasions since 1958 by governments of the right, center, and left. In most of these cases, however, the mechanism was employed for matters such as budgetary appropriations. With his pension reform, Macron instead harnessed Article 49.3 to pass a deeply unpopular law that struck at the heart of French public life.

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In 2019, it seemed like France—and Macron—had learned this lesson. Responding to the yellow vest protests, Macron launched what he called the Great National Debate. He traveled the country for several months, directly consulting citizens on how to solve France’s problems. Although the exercise was met with skepticism, it yielded 1.9 million citizen contributions to an online forum, 10,134 town hall meetings, 16,337 “books of grievances” submitted by mayors, and 27,374 emails and letters to the government. It also led to the establishment of 21 regional citizens’ assemblies, where randomly selected groups of citizens were tasked with deliberating on a topic and producing policy recommendations or even legislative proposals.

After the Great National Debate, Macron announced the creation of the Citizens’ Convention for Climate, France’s first national citizens’ assembly. Over the course of nine months, 150 randomly selected citizens deliberated and worked with experts to create policies that would reduce France’s carbon emissions in a socially conscious manner. The convention produced the most ambitious climate policy framework in France’s history, developing 149 different proposals—none of which included the controversial fuel tax that had sparked the yellow vest protests. Many participants of the convention were disappointed when some of their proposals were ignored or altered by Parliament. But these proposals still formed the basis of France’s Climate and Resilience Law, which Parliament approved in 2021.

While not perfect, these experiments in deliberative democracy gave more French citizens access to levers of power—and yielded better legislative proposals as a result.

Citizens’ assemblies and other innovations have already made some impact on local levels, and the OECD has documented close to 600 deliberative processes in its member countries since the 1980s. But on a national level, they have so far existed largely on the fringe of democratic governance.

The exceptions provide important proofs of concept. In 2012, the Irish government experimented with a Constitutional Convention that brought together 66 randomly selected citizens and 33 politicians. The experiment was in part a response to a severe economic crisis that had crippled the country a few years prior. Among other outcomes, the convention laid the groundwork for a national referendum that legalized same-sex marriage in 2015. Then, in 2017, a different citizens’ assembly of 99 randomly selected citizens recommended ending Ireland’s constitutional ban on abortion. This also became law via a 2018 plebiscite.

In France, during the same weeks that the rest of the nation erupted in protest over pension reform, the Economic, Social, and Environmental Council—a constitutional consultative assembly—finished convening its second national citizens’ assembly, this time on end-of-life policies. Macron has said that the citizens’ recommendations will form the basis of new legislation that will be introduced over the summer. This assembly was another step in the right direction for France, though still too marginal and insufficiently accessible to the broader public.

Such fora can no longer act only as stopgaps to respond to public outrage in moments of crisis. For these deliberative bodies to meaningfully reduce populist angst, they must be permanently institutionalized, expanded in their scope and frequency, and better integrated with the public. In other words, they need to become normal parts of everyday governance. Otherwise, populist movements will continue to fester, and governments will continue to miss out on the collective intelligence of the entire population.

Fortunately, modern technology makes it easier to expand democratic participation and ensure the government is responsive to all citizens. In Taiwan, for example, the digital platform pol.is uses machine learning to track trends in public opinion. Pol.is has already been used to identify points of agreement on dozens of polarizing issues, involving almost half of the island’s population of 24 million. Eighty percent of the recommendations made through the platform have reportedly led to government action, which has helped overcome rampant partisanship and rebuild public trust.

In Estonia, where 99 percent of public services are available online and internet access is considered a human right, more than one-third of eligible voters vote digitally and various electronic tools enable citizens to directly consult the government on drafted laws and propose their own initiatives. An authentically democratic society in the 21st century should include technologically augmented citizen participation at its core.

The situation in France is a lesson for the world on the perils and promises of modern democratic governance. Michel de Montaigne, a philosopher of the French Renaissance and former mayor of Bordeaux, once wrote that “laws are often made by fools, and even more often by men who fail in equity because they hate equality.” As Bordeaux City Hall burned in March, this sentiment rang true for many across the country. If Macron is serious about his vision to modernize France, he must convince citizens that equality is also something he desires.