As with the Yellow Vest protests last year, much will depend on the battle for public opinion. The government was forced to listen, and keep a check on police repression, for as long as there was popular support for that movement. When that support dwindled toward 50 percent, the government shut its ears and unleashed the police.
Polls released Thursday, before the beginning of the strike, showed popular support for it at close to 70 percent.
“What will play for Emmanuel Macron and Edouard Philippe,” his prime minister, “is public opinion,” said Jean Garrigues, a political historian at the University of Orleans. “They’re playing on the degeneration of the movement in public opinion,” as with the Yellow Vests, he said.
But playing against that is the solitary nature of power as conceived by Mr. Macron himself.
“The nature of his movement is that it is constructed around one man,’’ Mr. Garrigues said. ‘‘So there’s very little room to maneuver.”
Reporting was contributed by Aurelien Breeden and Elizabeth Alderman in Paris, and by Elian Peltier in London.
Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/world/europe/france-strike-macron.html
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