Behind his wooden desk, the Renaissance deputy Stéphane Mazars mechanically refreshes, on the screen of his smartphone, the news feed of Aveyron Press Center. His parliamentary assistant based in the constituency confirms it to him by SMS: there are people, a lot of people, nearly 11,000 demonstrators, in the city center of Rodez. A few rows lower, on his left, his colleague from the Horizons group François Jolivet receives, at irregular intervals, a few text messages from the prefect of Indre, informing him of the advance of the procession of 8,000 heads in Châteauroux. The same goes for Mosellan Ludovic Mendes, Gersois Jean-René Cazeneuve, Berrichon François Cormier-Bouligeon, as for most parliamentarians of the majority who, on this day of strike, managed to rally the National Assembly and activated their field informants. They all have their minds elsewhere. This January 31 in the hemicycle, Olivier Dussopt multiplies the speeches, but the questions to the government do not channel all the attention. Even less than usual, one would dare: the burning political news takes place outside the walls of the Palais-Bourbon.
The second big day of mobilization against the pension reform is a success, less by the number of demonstrators in the streets of Paris, or large cities, than by that of the protesters who marched in the small and medium-sized municipalities of the country. “500 demonstrators in Carentan-les-Marais, it’s been a long time since we’ve seen that”, recognizes the deputy of the Channel and former Minister of Agriculture Stéphane Travert, far from being the only one among the elected macronists to establish this finding. No matter how you call it, it is indeed this “peripheral France”, this “France of the prefectures and sub-prefectures”, where the rate of civil servants is high, where the working population is particularly sensitive to the question of hardship , who woke up.
“In these territories there is a different employment structure, exhausting, difficult jobs. These French people consider that they have the right to retire earlier than a tertiary executive in a metropolis”, indicates Laurent Chalard, doctor in geography at the University of Paris-Sorbonne. A phenomenon that did not surprise another geographer, Christophe Guilluy, author of Dispossessed. The survival instinct of the working classes (Flammarion): “Such a serious social protest could only emanate from that France, the one that has played the game of globalisation, European integration, economic restructuring, which deals with constrained solidarity, but at which has never been offered any prospects. It is undergoing deindustrialization, the flight of employment which is concentrated in a few territories, in particular in the metropolises, to which it has less and less access.
Macronie “worried”
Some would see in these thousands of French people who pounded the pavement in Lannion, Dole, Sète, Auch or even Mâcon and Thionville, the return of a “France of yellow vests”: this is where they emerged and shaken up Emmanuel Macron’s first five-year term. However, the theater of the battle for pensions is, after all, quite classic. The movement is structured by the unions and the left movements, unlike the yellow vests born “outside the frame”. Nevertheless, the body politic hardly differs: “It is not illogical that this peripheral France is mobilizing against Emmanuel Macron. Its electorate is not the France of work and low incomes, the active France which lives this moment of dispossession”, continues Guilluy.
Within the presidential majority, the time is not for panic, far from it, but “we are worried, it would be lying to say the opposite”, murmurs one of the pillars of the Renaissance group at the Assembly. Several deputies from these rural or semi-rural areas also see in this social anger that is expressed calmly at their window foundations that go beyond the simple question of pensions. “We can feel this feeling of downgrading, confides an experienced parliamentarian. The messages I hear at home are ‘There are only for cities, we are stuck with wind turbines, we are forbidden to drive in our car, or to hunt on Sunday’…”
But who, in the government or at the Elysée, to deal with these deputies who doubt? In the old world, it was a profession in its own right, a full-time job. We made sure that the parliamentarians of the majority did not fail in the passage of a law and, if not, we tried to understand why they could defect. François Mitterrand had Michel Charasse, Jacques Chirac could count on Roger Romani, Nicolas Sarkozy on Jérôme Peyrat and François Hollande on Bernard Rullier. These had been a senator, deputy, local elected official or, at worst, secretary general of the parliamentary group. In the new world, the job has almost disappeared around Emmanuel Macron. “Whether at the level of the Renaissance party or the executive, they do not use enough sensors capable of probing France from the territories, confides an elected representative from the south of France. They lack this ability to get information close to the field. No one, for example, called me to ask me how things were going at home!”
While many in the ranks of Renaissance point to the government’s lack of education on hardship, long careers and the issue of inequality between women and men, many place their hopes in the debate at the Assembly national to rectify the message sent to the French throughout the territory. “The reform is justified, but I expect it to be fair, there is still grain to grind”, explains one of them, elected since 2017. But everyone knows that the hardest part will come after the vote of the text, whatever happens: “The president is fully aware that the reform will leave in the country a trace of bitterness, of sourness, and that some will remain convinced of having lost there, indicates an intimate of Emmanuel Macron. We will have to produce real work, demanding and perceptible, for the many people who are exhausted at work if we want to repair this feeling of being despised by white collar workers.”