By ramming through his disputed “pension reform” law, French President Emmanuel Macron, a former investment banker, is probably repeating Thatcher’s famous argument: “There is no alternative.” The brutal destruction of a key part of the French postwar social welfare state, a decent pension, is considered the bloody sacrifice required to keep market confidence and talk down the rating agencies now threatening to lower France’s credit rating.
The real issue that the President doesn’t have the guts to address publicly is the high-density impact of the French economy on a bungling national energy policy and the blowback of the West’s sanctions against Russia, China, and the rest of the world.
