## F02 LiveFromFrance S2E02

The Year of the Dragon has just begun, but it does not seem to be a year of change for France. You could see it with a new government that is not really new...Perhaps the idea of what recycling should be, for Macron ?  But everyone knows that the real Prime Minister is President Macron himself, ... which makes him so close to Donald Trump who uses secretary of state as a disposable handkerchief ! Speaking of clones, President Macron wanted to be General De Gaulle at his press conference in January 2024. There was something of the big conferences of the 60s, when the great Charles gave his lessons to the journalists of the «royal court». Unfortunately, the form was there, but the content was much further to the right. Macron simply copied Jean-Marie Le Pen's old slogans and used his old-fashioned words, which he may think is useful to flatter old France. A young president like Trudeau, but with the ideas of Biden's father, or maybe Trump's father?!  But let us not forget what happened last month when the im
migration law .... was voted for by right-wing and far-right MPs. After being validated by the Conseil Constitutionnel, the French Supreme Court, three quarters of the law have been erased. The right-wingers are screaming and shouting about the Conseil constitutionnel, talking about a "judicial dictatorship" ..... But they want what appears to be a dictatorship, without judges and without a court to validate whether a law is constitutional... And the law will be applied in this amputated way.

At the same time, the north of France and the island of Réunion (Indian Ocean) were hit by natural disasters: floods and Siberian cold on the one hand, and storms on the other. But for the rest of France, this winter and autumn has been quite good, with plenty of water for water resources (water table, groundwater). In the north, many towns and villages had more than 1 metre of water in the houses for several weeks. This is one of the poorest regions in France and many houses can't be sold. The other poorest region of mainland France is in the extreme south and has the same problem as Barcelona: no water! The reasons are linked to global warming and its effects on the climate, with more extreme phenomena, but also to concrete development with roads and industrial estates, agriculture that has destroyed hedges, ... Add to this the inflation (more than 5.7%... and more than 10% for food alone) and you can imagine the state of mind. The Minister for the Economy went on radio and television to announce a 10% in
crease in the cost of electricity! And then...

The revolt came from the south: at the end of January, the main farmers' unions began to set up barricades on the main roads. They wanted lower taxes on fuel and diesel, higher prices for what they sell (cereals, fruit, vegetables, animal meat...) and fewer standards, because the agri-food industry and the supermarkets import the same products from abroad with fewer standards or controls and cheaper. The problem is real and is shared by many farmers in Europe (the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and now Italy, Spain...). The problem is aggravated by the fact that some of the leaders of the main trade unions are also heads of large agri-food companies, which push their members towards more intensive agriculture, which is harmful to the environment, but above all competes with the agriculture of developing countries, which sells for less. Like the Titanic, agriculture will hit an iceberg and sink. The main union, the FNSEA, is like a mafia, all-powerful in favoring its members in the redistribution of subsidies 
by the departmental agricultural chambers or in putting pressure on elected representatives, and it has been doing so for 70 years. The same policy has led to the emergence of factory farms (more than 500 cows in a shed or thousands of chickens), which also come to France via large and powerful landowners. With inflation, French consumers can't buy local products because they are too expensive. But the French consumer accepts the norms and standards that protect people from pesticides. This was not enough to maintain this protection, because in order to reassure the farmers, the government decided to stop the plan to reduce the use of pesticides (and the European Commission did the same a few days later!)... and to stop the agreement between Mercosur (the Southern Common Market) and Europe, which was being discussed in the European Commission (Germany and Spain are upset!). Don't forget that there are elections for the European Parliament this year. If you're clever and powerful enough to block a country, th
is is the time to do it...but not just any way !

The other strange moment in this uprising was when the Minister of the Interior said that the police would not intervene because "I refuse to send the CRS on people who are working". Everyone remembered the police violence against workers demonstrating to keep the retirement age or for more resources for hospitals. Even for the farmers, the police applied double standards: No action against the FNSEA union and even the CR union (linked to right-wing and far-right parties), but violent action against the "Confédération Paysanne" (a left-wing union). If you want to protest in France, take your tractor and an FNSEA flag and you can burn the fences of a prefecture or destroy the front of a supermarket with slurry. I could imagine nurses and shop assistants wearing clogs on tractors, proudly carrying bales of straw between the Place de la République and the Place de la Bastille in Paris. A cliché? That's the government's typical view of farmers, as we saw when the Prime Minister, surrounded by bales of straw,
 presented his agricultural measures to a group of gentle people in a town in the south of France., with a nice Hugo Boss suit, of course. And after all that, you can imagine the French environmental policy .... in the slurry! Nothing must interfere with the Olympic Games, so it's time to demonstrate... but to the right.

Oh, I forgot the ephemeral Minister of Education! Amélie Oudéa-Castera (AOC for the French, but nothing to do with the real AOC), former tennis player and then Minister for Youth and Sport, after being President of the national tennis federation (for half a billion euros a year!) and married to the CEO of one of the most scandalous banks in France....She has been Minister of Education for 4 weeks... with her children in a controversial private school (homophobic, conservative...). Not the right profile to understand some of the worst teachers in the OECD (1). She was astonished to see pupils wearing sports shoes, not imagining that these were their everyday shoes....This type of shoe is banned in her son's private school. She's now been replaced by the former Minister of Justice... but she's still the Minister of the Olympic Games (!!). Speaking of the Olympics, after the temporary inflation of the price of public transport, the fact that employees working in Paris are being encouraged to work remotely dur
ing the Olympics, despite their companies demanding the opposite, here comes the mega-salary of the president of the organising committee, with an unprecedented financial package... The French soap opera will be animated!

2Dɛ

[(1) : Teachers income](https://data.oecd.org/teachers/teachers-salaries.htm)

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