France’s President Emmanuel Macron on Monday raised the alarm over the “ill wind” of the rise of the far right in European politics, during a state visit to Germany ahead of key EU elections.
I genuinely believe that he will go down in history as our Thatcher. He has been in government for roughly 10 years now and everything he did was to destroy the fabric of the French social system.
A few things he did :
He raised the age of retirement, against the advice of many people more knowledgeable than him, and people's will. Even against what employers unions wanted, that's to say something.
He has reduced the length of unemployment and is planning to reduce it further
He gave the rich massive tax cuts
He gave big corpos massive subsidies
He and his government are often siding with the far right to vote on some issues
He is cutting taxes left and right and then is wondering where all the money has gone
He massively increased our deficit
Repression is on the rise
He's given the legion d'honneur to Total's CEO and to Bezos
His environment policies are pretty much inexistant
He is always siding with big corpos and industrial farming on pretty much every issue
He and his government are openly supporting Israel
He is also often caught saying one thing and doing the opposite (most recent example: trying to fight far right ideas and then his prime minister debates the secretary of RN on a public service channel, a few days away from European elections in which that dude is about to get majority. Like, what the fuck?)
I could go on and on but you get the gist. People are tired, all the protests are violently repressed, except a few that usually are organised by the far right. People are getting poorer, our school system is crumbling, our healthcare too and the country is visible getting more authoritarian by the day. But we have a few more billionaires and the ones that were already there are richer than ever.
Not from there, but didn't he shove a ton of austerity down the French people's throat, like raising the retirement age? There were big protests and stuff
Exactly this. He's a corpocrat, which is a big no-no in the french public eye. Also, he has more of an assimilation instead of integration style in regards to immigration politics, so he's right leaning as well. Doesn't help that the left doesn't have any candidates that anyone can take seriously.
On a more general note than the answer you already got, he is extremely authoritarian, absolutely never listen to the people same for his government, refuses to change his mind on anything and isn't open to discussion on anything. Even with the state of emergency being declared on part of the territory, he didn't give anything away to make it stop.
So he destroys the social net, and people's beliefs in democracy : that's the two things you have to do to raise far right anywhere.