Macron’s “reforms” entirely reorganized the French labor market to give unprecedented power to employers and corporations. They play on the false and dangerous promise that deregulating labor markets will result in reduced unemployment and economic growth. While the French labor market remains more protective of workers than say, the U.S. model, this reform brings France much closer to the American model.
A few months later, Macron’s bloc in the French parliament voted on a new budget that Trump would’ve happily signed. It slashed the corporate tax rate down to 25 percent (from 33 percent), scrapped a longstanding “solidarity tax on wealth” (France was the last EU country to have a wealth tax), cut 1.7 billion euros in housing aid, and eliminated 120,000 public contract jobs.
This led the well-respected French economist Thomas Piketty to compare Macron to Trump, who just passed a $1.5 trillion tax giveaway to the rich and corporations in the United States.
Both men, Piketty argues, share the same flawed economic vision — a variant of the trickle-down theory that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher swore by. And both falsely claim that cutting taxes on the wealthiest benefits ordinary people and stimulates the economy by giving the rich incentives to invest in their country.
This theory was, of course, never proven scientifically — and au contraire, reports have shown that these policies contribute to the rise of deep inequality. According to the Observatoire Français des Conjonctures Economiques (OFCE), an independent economic research center, 42 percent of the French tax reduction will in fact only benefit the wealthiest 2 percent. The numbers are comparably skewed in the United States.
Trump and Macron “refuse to take into account facts which are now well established, namely that the groups to which they give preference are those who have already acquired a disproportionate share of the growth in recent decades,” Piketty concludes. Yet both presidents want the masses to cherish the wealthy, whom Trump hails as “job creators” and Macron calls “lead climbers.”
No wonder opposition parties in France are calling Macron the “president of the rich.”
Inhumanity to Immigrants
More surprisingly, given Macron’s image as a redoubt against France’s resurgent far right, the French president has tacked a decidedly Trumpian line on immigration. The man who once congratulated German Prime Minister Angela Merkel for responding “humanly” to the refugee crisis by opening Germany’s doors now supports a crackdown on undocumented migrants.
This month, the administration is expected to unveil a new migration and asylum bill that will toughen immigration laws in an unprecedented way. NGOs, charities, and non-profit organizations describe the bill as inhumane and warn of potential human rights violations. “No government since the end of World War Two has dared” to go as far as Macron in tightening migration, French immigration Patrick Weil told Europe 1. Even members of Macron’s own party are expressing serious concerns.
The bill reduces the time for migrants to apply for asylum from 120 days to 90 days, and to two weeks to appeal a decision instead of a month. On the other hand, it would increase the maximum time migrants spend in detention centers from 45 days to 90 days, and from 16 hours to 24 hours in case of administrative detention.
These measures give authorities more time and power to increase and accelerate deportations for those who are deemed unqualified for asylum. It’s a tidy parallel to the massive deportation apparatus the Trump is building in the United States, while drastically cutting back the number of refugees the country accepts.
Meanwhile, humanitarian groups such as Human Rights Watch and Doctors Without Borders have been condemning French authorities for turning a blind eye to widespread reports of police violence against migrants, such as confiscating their sleeping bags and blankets in freezing temperatures, barring aid groups from distributing basic supplies, and indiscriminately attacking people with pepper spray.
And late last year, Macron’s interior minister, Gerard Collomb, ordered regional authorities to conduct ID checks in emergency shelters. This would turn away undocumented migrants from seeking refuge and help in times of emergency.
Sure, the French president is highly educated, able to hold philosophical discussions, and does not bully his opponents on Twitter like his American counterpart, who’s often described as unstable, provocative, and vulgar. However, they both have authoritarian tendencies and hold great disdain for the poor.
If there’s a humane alternative to the plutocratic and xenophobic politics of the far right on both sides of the Atlantic, it won’t be found in Macron’s deceptively right-wing centrism.