The last decade has seen mass discontent and protests across the west: against populism, poverty and the green movement. Strikes, demonstrations and disturbances are a new normal, including here in Britain. But the scale and ferocity of the scenes on the streets of France and Israel have been abnormal even by this standard. What is going on?
There is a superficial similarity to the protests. In both cases, governments with strong, polarising leaders have attempted to force through reforms against huge opposition, with many people having taken to the streets. Both the raising of the pension age in France and the curbing of judicial independence in Israel sparked protests that are as much about the governments themselves as their latest policies. Emmanuel Macron, who came through the political centre to win a second term last year, unified France’s powerful far left and far right against himself, both of them hoping to replace him in due course. Benjamin Netanyahu came back from the political dead last year, at the head of a coalition with far-right parties intent on dismantling Israel’s liberal institutions, particularly its activist Supreme Court. This latest attack has united the whole centre and left behind an existential battle to protect Israeli democracy.
The protests in France and Israel have been very effective at bringing cities and public services to a halt. We have seen effective direct action in Britain too, with public sector pay strikes and Extinction Rebellion protests. With each wave, governments take new powers and deploy new tactics to try and end the protests, which generally exacerbates them until they achieve at least some of their objectives—most of the time.
However, the French and Israeli cases are fundamentally different from each other in their motivation. In France, the extremes are rebelling against the centre. In Israel, the centre is rebelling against the extremes.
Macron’s key reform, to raise the state pension age from 62 to 64, is a centrist technocratic reform—albeit with big social implications—following the international trend towards higher retirement ages. The only surprise is that it has taken France so long to catch up.
Similarly, the protests against Macron overriding parliament to force through the pension changes turns on constitutional provisions that date back to General de Gaulle. These provisions have been used 100 times in the last 65 years to enact controversial reforms that the elected president wishes to impose on a parliament where he lacks a majority. The process is not undemocratic: as well as the president being elected, it also allows the National Assembly to hold a vote of no confidence, which Macron won, before the law is enacted. So Macron was operating within the existing constitution to enact an essential pension reform, which is highly unlikely to be reversed even if the far-right leader Marine Le Pen ends up taking his job in four years’ time.
In other words, the French disturbances, for all their ferocity, have essentially failed and the liberal centrist establishment has essentially won. And when it comes to the next French presidential election, I doubt that Le Pen will ultimately win. Far more likely is the triumph of another centrist, à la Macron, coming through in the middle of the far right and far left.
In Israel, by contrast, the ever-populist Netanyahu is seeking to change the existing constitution in fundamental respects, in the teeth of centrist opinion. In coalition with far-right, pro-settler and intensely anti-Palestinian parties, he wants to give the Knesset—in effect his government—the power to override Supreme Court judgments it does not like and emasculate the court in other ways. Netanyahu’s coalition partner Itamar Ben-Gvir, the firebrand head of the Jewish Power party and national security minister who backs the bill, is loathed by liberal and left-wing Israelis. Indeed, most of the nation’s establishment in effect joined the general strike against the government this week, raising fears for national security. These judicial reforms have now been “paused”, and will probably be modified to avoid a recurrence of the general strike.
For centrist moderates like me, the Israeli case is heartening, even inspiring. It shows that the devil doesn’t have all the best tunes in political protest. Liberal reasonableness against the extremes will sometimes win out. I fondly hoped that the same might happen here in Britain, when a million thoroughly reasonable centrists twice took to the streets of London calling for a second referendum on Brexit four years ago. We failed in the short term, but who knows, the ultimate victory might lie with the protesters, not the Brexit populists who overrode them.
