Macron has confirmed the French people’s worst fears about him

His actions will exacerbate cynicism and mistrust of authorities and elites, writes Borzou Daragahi

Nationwide protests against the reforms have turned violent (AP)

French voters did not re-elect Emmanuel Macron last year with a nearly 60 per cent majority for his social, economic, and political vision. He was in large part re-elected in spite of them.

Voters re-elected him in a landslide because the alternative was Marine Le Pen, a Kremlin-backed far-right ideological descendant of Nazi collaborators. As he acknowledged during his victory speech during a rare moment of humility, a number of French people voted for him “not to support my ideas, but to stop the ideas of the far right”.

At that moment, a nation emerging from the trauma of the Covid pandemic and the shock of the Russian invasion of Ukraine did not grant him the authority to make any bold moves, as shown by his loss of a parliamentary majority two months later. French voters certainly did not give him an explicit mandate to revamp France’s pensions programme by increasing the age of retirement, plunging the country into chaos, and prompting crippling waves of public strikes and street violence.