Roger Cohen has a superb wrap-up of President Macron and French society:
"We have a president who makes use of a permanent coup d’état." That was the verdict of Olivier Faure, the leader of the French Socialist Party, after President Emmanuel Macron
rammed through a bill raising the retirement age in France to 64 from 62 without a full parliamentary vote this past week
Legality is one thing [his was a legal act] and legitimacy another. Mr. Macron may see his decision as necessary to cement his legacy as the leader who left France prepared to face the rest of the 21st century. But to many French people it looked like presidential diktat, a blot on his reputation and a blow to French democracy....
What would have looked like a defining victory for Mr. Macron, even if the parliamentary vote in favor had been narrow, now looks like a Pyrrhic victory....
Macron scarcely laid the groundwork for his pension measure even though he knew well that it would touch a deep French nerve at a time of economic hardship. His push for later retirement was top-down, expedited at every turn and, in the end, ruthless.
The case for the overhaul was strong. It was not only to Mr. Macron that retirement at 62 looked untenable as lives grew longer. The math, over the longer term at least, simply does not add up in a system where the ratio of active workers to the retirees they are supporting through their payroll taxes keeps dropping.
But in an anxious France, with many people struggling to pay their bills and unsure of their futures, Mr. Macron could not make the argument. In fact, he hardly seemed to try....
If Marine Le Pen of the far right is not to fill it, Mr. Macron the reformist must deliver the resilient, vibrant France for which he believes his much-contested reform was an essential foundation.
The name "Le Pen" frightens. It is precisely the kind of action that Macron took that will invite the very extremism he, as a politician, had worked to deflate. If not the extremism of the right, then the extremism of the left.
Even with a no-confidence vote in parliament, Macron's presidency is safe for four more years. But I expect center-left and center-right politicians will not be. Societal anger will do what it always does, it will swing wildly in one or the other direction — whichever side demagogues with the greater false appeal.
Macron's pragmatic effort will have been for nothing, and France will have a reckless immoderate in the powerful office of the presidency.
If they are to last, major social changes — and for the French, raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 qualifies as such — require broad public support. As Cohen observes, Macron "hardly seemed to try." Instead he opted for the shortcut of "ruthlessness."
My guess is that French voters will reciprocate.