Good morning, friends!
It all began, in a way, with a broken boiler.
More accurately, with many of them. Pupils at French secondary schools began protesting a few weeks ago about conditions at their schools: classrooms with 35 pupils, teacher shortages, facilities in need of repair, and schools that are cold in winter and hot in summer.
From there, we arrived at the hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets on Saturday, the return of the “yellow vests”, the clashes, the looting and the arson.
One important clarification. France has a long tradition of social movements, strikes and clashes with the authorities of the day. And the vast majority of those who demonstrated on Saturday were not setting fire to town halls or looting shops. Estimates put the number of protesters at 550,000 to 800,000, most of whom marched peacefully. It would therefore be a mistake to equate social protest with petrol bombs.
France is one of the world’s wealthiest countries, has a strong welfare state and, on a range of indicators, the average French person still enjoys better living conditions than the average Greek.
At the same time, however, for decades France has struggled to implement and, above all, complete reforms that would make this model sustainable. Today it is trapped between high public debt and deficits on the one hand, and a society demanding better public services, greater purchasing power and the preservation of social benefits on the other.
There is another dimension, too.
A significant proportion of French people of second- or third-generation immigrant background feel they are not equal participants in French society. And yet the figures also point to a different picture.
The descendants of immigrants move up the social ladder more often than their parents did, and their occupational status has drawn closer to that of the rest of the population. Yet among the descendants of immigrants from outside Europe, a sense of discrimination is not only failing to disappear but is growing. More than one in four believe that others do not see them as French.
This is precisely where the subjective meets the objective.
You may have been born in France, gone to a French school and be better off than your parents, yet still feel excluded from the mainstream of society, particularly its upper echelons.
And in politics, for better or worse, it is not statistics that vote. It is people.
That is the lesson for us, too. Greece is not France, and the two situations should not be equated. But just as looking at the petrol bombs is not enough to understand what is happening in France, looking at growth, surpluses, investment or any other macroeconomic indicator is not enough to understand what is happening in a society.
People do not live in averages. They live on their wages, pay their rent, go to hospital, send their children to school and count what they have left at the end of the month.
It is not enough for the numbers to look good. At some point, people must feel it too. Otherwise, as the gap between the numbers and their lives widens, so does distrust of those telling them that everything is getting better.
And then the crisis has already begun. Long before the petrol bombs.