Author: Liz Alderman / Source: New York Times
Graffiti equating President Emmanuel Macron to the king during the French Revolution, on the Palais Garnier opera house in Paris this week. Kamil Zihnioglu/Associated Press
PARIS — President Emmanuel Macron of France is facing the toughest crisis of his leadership after three weeks of violent protests across the country. “Yellow Vest” demonstrators have demanded that the government give financial relief to large parts of the population that are struggling to make ends meet.
Prime Minister Edouard Philippe sought to calm the furor on Tuesday by suspending a planned fuel tax increase for six months, reversing a policy that had set off the revolt.
But it’s not apparent that this single concession can clear the streets.
The Yellow Vest movement — whose followers wear or display high-visibility vests used in emergencies — has morphed into a collective outcry over deeper problems that have plagued France for years: declining living standards and eroding purchasing power.
Both of which have worsened in the aftermath of Europe’s long-running financial crisis.Here are some numbers that explain why France has erupted.
A protest in Lyon last year against the labor code overhaul.
€1,700: Median monthly take-home pay
France, like other Western countries, has seen a deep gap grow between its richest and poorest citizens. The top 20 percent of the population earns nearly five times as much as the bottom 20 percent.
France’s richest 1 percent represent over 20 percent of the economy’s wealth. Yet the median monthly income is about 1,700 euros, or $1,930, meaning that half of French workers are paid less than that.
Many of the Yellow Vest demonstrators are protesting how difficult it is to pay rent, feed their families and simply scrape by as living costs — most notably fuel prices — keep rising while their household incomes barely budge.
It wasn’t always this way.
Living standards and wages rose in France after World War II during a 30-year growth stretch known as “Les Trente Glorieuses.” Pay gains for low- and middle-income earners continued through the early 1980s, thanks to labor union collective bargaining agreements.
But those dynamics unraveled as successive left-leaning French governments sought to improve competitiveness in part by compressing wage gains, according to the French economist Thomas Piketty.
Average incomes for low- and middle-income earners stagnated, growing by around 1 percent a year or less.The rich got richer, as top earners saw income gains of around 3 percent a year. Increasingly generous executive pay for very high earners has helped tip the scale.
French workers are still better off than those in Italy, where real wage growth has been negative since 2016. Real wages there fell 1.1 percent between the fourth quarters of 2016 and 2017, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
But while real hourly wages are rising in France, that growth has come slowly, even more so since the end of the eurozone debt crisis in 2012.
1.8 percent: Economic growth
France is the third biggest economy in Europe after Britain and Germany, and the world’s sixth largest before adjusting for inflation. Visitors to Paris can come…
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