France is caught in a vortex of protests. Even after President Emmanuel Macron conceded demands like reduction in fuel price, withdrawal of tax hike and tax relief for pensioners, France has not yet been able to douse the fire of mutiny by yellow vests.
The protests, in which eight people were killed and over 14,000 injured, have been continuing on the streets of Paris even on Saturday with demands of the President's resignation. About 80,000-strong security forces have been deployed across the country to deal with the strikes, and 1,400 are in preventive detention. Countries including US, Britain, Germany and Italy have called on their citizens to take precautionary measures. The statement by finance minister Bruno Le Maire that in tourism sector alone the country has suffered a loss of 1.5 billion Euro, speaks for the gravity of the socio-economic crisis faced by France.
France, like many other major European countries, spend nearly 30 per cent of state revenue on social welfare. To put it otherwise, 14 per cent of French nationals that are below the poverty line, live on state-funded welfare schemes. But the 'market' economy ushered in by globalization, has inflicted a damage on France's social security too. The new government is of the view that without cancelling subsidies and introducing new taxes, the economic woes of the country cannot be solved. For the same reason, the slogains raised by the yellow vests in the beginning of their strike were the same as in the strikes for justice and rights gaining strength all over the world. Their argument is that statistically the country may be recording growth, but the gap between the haves and have nots is widening; the burden of all reforms are put on the common man while all their benefits go to the rich. This is the reason for agitations demanding social justice fast becoming accceptable to the people. But the factor that took the final phase of the strike to the extreme right is Macron's failure to recognize and contain the dissatisfaction getting rooted in the people at large. And as the official spokesan Griveaux lamented, those sitting in government offices could not realize the intensity of people's anger.
It is not only France, but most of the European countries including Britain as well, that are going through social and economic turbulence. Theresa May's Britain is trying to grapple with the Brexit quagmire. In Hungary, tens of thousands of labourers are on the streets against an overtime law, calling the new reform as law of slavery. Germany, Italy and Spain too are on the brink of popular protests. Although at the root of all the strikes are economic policies, the contemporary complexity in Europe is that they soon turn into anti-immigration and against environment regulations. And the reason for that is the rightists' agenda of turning disaffection and popular anger growing in Europe into their short cut to power. They continue to succeed in their attempt to derail the agenda of revolts by igniting the sentiments about European psyche of identity rooted in ownership of the country, white racism and Christianity. It was a conjugation of econmic inequality with anti-immigration stances that drove Britain to the crisis of quitting European Union called Brexit.
In the vanguard of making Europe unstable and in aiding and abetting the radical right there, is US President Trump. Trump, who ceaselessly tweets criticising the French President, has been publicly asking European nations to pull out of the 2015 Paris agreement on Climate Change. The attempt of Trump and his votaries is to drive home the theory that Europe is being destroyed by their love for environment which spoils industrial income. Drawing succour from such Trump pranks, extreme right leader Marine Le Pen is driving the yellow vests' rebellion to a path of violence and intensifying her argument that France should quit EU (Frexit). The results of elections in Italy and Spain prove that not only in France, but in a majority of European countries, extreme right is gaining strength. The EU election scheduled to take place in 2019 will serve to show in which direction EU is moving. And the evolution of each agitation in Europe instils the fear whether that direction will be to another tragedy in history.