Suddenly, it’s all about listening. Trickle-down democracy has had its day – at least for the moment.
France’s President Macron has been through a baptism of fire that no one could have predicted. The gilets-jaunes protesters, numbering at their peak in the hundreds of thousands, were fed up listening to the blandishments of their youthful head of state, who had spent much of his time since taking office in 2017 lecturing them on why they were lazy and useless and, to be frank, surplus to the nation’s requirements.
