https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/centre-cannot-hold
A protester holds a placard with a photo of French president Emmanuel Macron and a guillotine in front of a burning tourism office during a demonstration against rising living costs and in solidarity with students’ grievances in Lyon, France, October 17,…
The escalating political and social crisis exposed by the young people, workers, unemployed, and retirees joining demonstrations in France last week, marks a new stage in a movement building for weeks and whose origins are decades old.
This crisis is rooted in the decision of French and EU political leaders and bankers to embark on a road to a Federal Europe enshrined in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty with a single currency and a single interest rate run by a European Central Bank in Frankfurt.
The current protest movement in France cannot be resolved by snap elections or a change of bourgeois government. The demands of the protests in France are for higher wages, increased social welfare benefits, and better pensions.
These are demands for a different kind of society, one that was ruled out by the Maastricht Treaty. The protesters are demanding a radical rupture with the politics of the EU and of so-called “centrism” exemplified in Emmanuel Macron.
As Europe approaches the fifth year of a war with Russia in Ukraine that its political and military leaders have stoked with money, guns and long-range missiles, frenzied discussions taking place in Paris, Brussels and Berlin, reveal the weakness and illegitimacy of the centrist project, which is predicated on denying the democratic right of citizens to choose an alternative path to that of neoliberalism and war.
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This was the spark that lit the explosion in France’s streets. It is a result of a young generation being offered a future of poverty, low pay and war-readiness by their ruling political parties and emphatically rejecting it.
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