It’s Judgement Day, not Freedom Day in France

The trouble with the French, it is sometimes said, is that they don’t know what’s good for them. 

As the French president looks at the opinion polls in the days since he announced a further ratcheting up of his government’s Covid response, Emmanuel Macron must wonder if he and the French people will ever end up on the same page. 

Already, following a wave of protests across the country over the weekend, he has been obliged to row back on the tough new regulations he announced only last Wednesday. Instead of fines of as much as 45,000 euros for allowing unvaccinated people to enter their premises, business owners now face a caution followed by fines starting as low as €1,500. Not only that, it is no longer clear when the new regime will enter into force. It could be August 1, but it could also be August 8, or later. Gabriel Attal, the government spokesman, told reporters he didn’t know for sure, and wouldn’t, or couldn’t, confirm the level of financial penalties.  

The President knows what is almost certainly coming in the months ahead. His advisers – echoing their opposite numbers in the US, UK and across the EU – have told him that the Delta variant, and quite possibly the more lethal Beta variant, of the coronavirus is likely to wreak havoc in France, pushing back the country’s social and economic recovery until well into 2022 – election year. 

Accordingly, he sought to make vaccination as near-mandatory as he could within the limits of the Constitution. He decreed that no one who was not fully vaccinated and in possession of an officially-issued pass sanitairewould be allowed to enter a bar or restaurant or place of public entertainment, such as a cinema or nightclub. More controversially, he ordered all health professionals, including workers in care-homes, to get jabbed or risk losing their jobs. 

On the face of it, Le Jour de la Liberté – Freedom Day – had been postponed until further notice, and the French didn’t like it. Not only is lockdown being extended, but they must now apply online for an intenal passport that allows them to travel freely in their own country. 

The Club-Med faction – those in their late teens and twenties – are understandably frustrated. The ill-spent youth which they value as a necessary right of passage has already been put on hold for the best part of two years. They want the time and space to let off steam before being forced to work 35 hours a week for the next 35 years until they can retire, aged 56, on a generous state or company pension. 

The hardliners of left and right want to make political capital. They won’t rest until representative democracy is replaced by the will of the people – as they see it. The anti-vaxers – at least a quarter of the adult population – meanwhile conflate freedom with the absolute right to choose. Though the French down or absorb more medicaments than just about any other people on the planet, the vaccine sceptics among them don’t see the point of needles, which for some reason they believe are aimed at transforming them into willing agents of the state. 

Just yesterday, a friend of mine told me that the mayor of her village was refusing to have anything to do with the Government’s campaign – and nor, he said, was a doctor friend of his who practised in the local hospital. 

All that said, it should be noted that a majority of the population sees sense in what the President decided, even if it is through gritted teeth, as does the Council of State, the body set up by Napoleon to ensure that the executive acts in accordance with the law.  But a significant minority of anti-vax refusenicks, reinforced by the usual suspects from the hard-left and far-right, as well as young people keen to throw off their shackles, called foul, taking their dissatisfaction not only onto the streets, but in several cases to vaccination centres, forcing several to close until the police were able to clear the scene.  

According to the interior ministry – which habitually fails to count much above a hundred thousand – there were 136 rallies against the new measures, involving some 114,000 demonstrators, including 18,000 in Paris. Even if we double the total, this is not a huge number out of a population of 67 million. At their peak, the gilets-jaunes could count on a turnout of close to half a million. But in France, the assumption is that each protester is doing the work of ten citizens, the other 90 per cent of whom look on in approval while electing not to be battoned or arrested. 

If that is true, then less than three million of the French are truly angry, meaning that the rest are merely concerned or – whisper it soft – on the President’s side. 

Macron will have kept a close eye on the figures and spoken with officials on the ground. He clearly decided that he could press ahead with his programme, but refine it and, where appropriate, pare it back. Cynics will say that he always intended to throw the protesters a bone and that the final package, as it emerges out of the mist, will be not so much Plan B as Plan A (1). Only Macron himself, and his prime minister Jean Castex, will know for sure. 

Opponents of the latest measures like to speak of an “attack on liberty,” leading to a two-class citizenry made up of the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. There has been talk of “segregation” and “apartheid,” though in each of these cases the logic would suggest that anti-vaxxers were born that way and have no choice in the matter. Placards reading “No to the Nazi Pass” spoke mainly of ignorance.  

Back in the real world, what we have seen is France voting with its feet. More than a million people, the majority of them under 30, applied to be jabbed within twenty-four hours of Macron’s address to the nation, and millions more have since followed suit. There will always be hold-outs and there will always be anti-government protests in Paris on a Saturday afteroon. Macron is not out of the woods on Covid anymore than Boris Johnson or, for that matter, Angela Merkel. 

As was inevitable, the fourth wave of the virus, as Gabriel Attal officially called it, is already placing renewed pressure on the French health system. There may be fewer deaths than in the first and second waves (just 20 patients died yesterday, taking the total to 112,000), but the number of cases is rising, to 18,000 in the 24 hours to lunchtime today, against 39,000 in the UK. 

The ongoing damage to the economy is harder to judge. France has been in recovery for the last three months and it had been expected that something close to normal production would be achieved by the middle of next year. Phase four of the virus has now thrown a spanner in the works, the only comfort being that France is not alone in facing the problem. 

Politically, the mix is much as before. The National Assembly began debating the pass sanitaire yesterday. A government majority was widely expected, and once the Senate adds its stamp of approval the measure will be ready to pass into law. Death threats issued to several deputies are being investigated by the police but were not expected to affect the result. According to the health minister, Oivier Véran, addressing deputies, the surge in cases was unprecdented and required urgent action

The National Rally of Marine Le Pen opposes the package on the basis that it is against everything put forward by Macron. Le Pen talks about liberty but will pick up any stick with which to to beat the President. The Socialists and the Greens, along with Macron’s own En Marche party, minus a handful of out-and-out liberartians – offered their grumbled support, while the centre-right while picking holes and striking attitudes, was not in rebellious mood. The only question was, would the pre-amended Bill make it through the process more or less as-is, or would the Opposition – just to show unwilling – shave just a fraction more off the bottom line? Democracy is all in the detail.