Emmanuel Macron, surreptitious socialist

THE TONE was sharp. Both hands were thumped testily on the table. The water glass trembled. “We’re putting a mad amount of dosh into social benefits!” cried Emmanuel Macron, sitting with his advisers upon silk-upholstered chairs in the Elysée palace. The video, posted unapologetically by an aide, went viral. This was in 2018, only a year into his presidency, and confirmed what many of the French already suspected. Their new president—a former investment banker, who scrapped the wealth tax and picked one (and later another) centre-right prime minister—was a right-leaning liberal who secretly sought to reward the rich and demolish the , France’s cradle-to-grave welfare state.The image endures. The president is still linked in the French mind to looser labour laws, an end to special pension rights for railway workers, and the longest strikes since 1968. In protest at his proposed (and later shelved) general pension reform, these seemed to bring France to a standstill, just weeks before the pandemic really did. Tough laws on security and Islamist extremism appeared to confirm a shift to the right. Today Mr Macron is muttering again about tightening pension rules to keep the French at their desks until later in life. France, a land of slow dining and swift indignation, is bracing itself for the worst. To revive pension reform now, said Laurent Berger, a (moderate) union leader, would be “totally crazy politically” and “socially explosive”.