Was French govt soft with Yellow Vests?

Since the middle of November, Paris has witnessed the Yellow Vest movement that started as a protest against the increase in fuel prices. The movement gets its name from the fluorescent yellow coloured hazard warning vests which the protesters have been wearing.

The movement had spread rapidly and engulfed almost entire Paris, its neighbourhoods, and even the hinterland of France was not untouched by the movement. More and more people from rural areas of France have been pouring into the streets of Paris to protest against the declining standards of living in France, however, all this started with a hike in fuel prices as additional tax particularly to take care of the heavy expenditure the country has to bear to move from fossil fuel to cleaner energy.

It's a part of its international obligations under the Paris climate control treaty. This is not the only reason for price hike but is a primary reason.

There are certain questions which arise in the minds of reasonable and prudent persons after getting to know of the initial outbreak of protests and their rapid development. Of late, the French government has been acting with an iron fist, but the facts very easily lead us to infer that the government had been quite soft in the beginning while handling the situation.

The role of the French government in the lives of French people is very important, as is the case in most of the countries, but in a welfare state like France, the democratic government has often been highly reluctant in making hard decisions which are truly required to be made in the long-term interest of the people.

Cutting down on expenses, minimising subsidies, making people work more number of hours in a week, increasing the retirement age, giving a push to austerity measures, and in general improving the work culture so as to align itself even a little bit with some of the countries where people work extremely hard – for example China, Japan, Singapore, India, even the United States, etc – have mostly been met with stiff resistance on the part of the French people. It is considered to be highly risky for any government to make any of these tough decisions, and, therefore, it has been quite obvious for different governments not to rake up these issues lest they should lose the popular vote in the next elections.

This is most unfortunate and speaks volumes about the myopic view taken both by the French people and the government. Thus, a price hike in fuel sparked the protests, which though not unthinkable in India are not that common. Despite severe poverty and inconvenience, people in India take any such price hike in their stride. There are often debates and protests, however, looting and arson are not the norms fortunately.

It is beyond comprehension that in a first world country like France the intelligence agencies of the government were not able to catch the right signal of severe frustration of the masses. Failure of the government on the aspect to anticipate what might have been the action of the disgruntled people, and to what extent the disenchanted persons may go simply proves that the government was not at all ready to tackle the situation proactively.

Even when the protests started, the government was found simply soft-pedalling. It is unbelievable that in a democratic country like France, the disgruntled citizens do not have enough opportunities and forums to vent out their feelings freely.

Dissent and free-speech are essential prerequisites for a functioning government of the people. We're not talking about a third world country like India – with a tremendously huge population and scarce resources – which faces numerous challenges a first world country has to never ever encounter. It is unfathomable as to why the French government was not able to contain the protest when it had erupted for the first time.

Even after that, there are no concrete steps taken by the government to have proper and constructed dialogue with the protesters. Individuals in good governments usually have the uncanny ability to anticipate future events, at least expected in the near future.

The author is a professor at IIM-A, 
akagarwal@iima.ac.in