For Macron, France’s troubled industries hit home
Categories: US NEWS
During the last presidential campaign, the troubled Whirlpool factory in the northern city of Amiens became the setting for frantic, dueling appeals for support by Emmanuel Macron and his far-right rival, Marine Le Pen.Macron promised to save the plant — which happens to be in his hometown — and once he was elected, his government poured millions in subsidies toward the factory’s reinvention as a showpiece of his commitment to reviving French industry.Today, the plant is an example of the difficulty of rehabilitating ailing French industries and of the president’s challenge in winning the confidence of French workers, who have been gravitating for years to the far-right. The plant’s new operator was convicted in February of misuse of funds after a year of taking money from the government and Whirlpool and doing precious little with it. Workers say they spent idle days as next to nothing rolled off the assembly line. Instead, they kept busy killing time, taking extended cigarette breaks or lying inside their cars fidgeting on their smartphones.“Two or three times, when someone important visited, we had to pretend to work or hide,” recalled Mariano Munoz, 49, who was in charge of janitorial services. “The welders welded all sorts of things and hammered away. One or two tinkered with a car. Me, I’d take the street cleaner and I’d sweep the entire parking lot.” Many of the laid-off workers went on to join the Yellow Vest movement, whose ranks were filled with working-class French struggling under high taxes and a lack of earning power, ushering in the biggest political crisis of Macron’s presidency.Burned by the Yellow Vest protests, Macron’s government spent massively to offset the economic shock of the pandemic, and unemployment is now at its lowest in a decade. Still, it is service-sector jobs that have continued to increase, while industrial employment declines. During Macron’s campaign for the presidency in 2017, 11 days before the final vote, Macron met with union leaders in town, while Le Pen paid a surprise visit to the plant’s parking lot and was greeted warmly by striking employees — forcing a reluctant Macron to follow.Heckled and jostled by the hostile crowd, Macron tried to catch up with Le Pen, whose party, then called the National Front, had won the department that includes Amiens in the first round of voting that year.In an interview with a French magazine last year, Macron said that growing up in Amiens, he had witnessed the “full force of deindustrialization” in his region. Still, he acknowledged that he himself had enjoyed a sheltered upbringing, living in a “rather happy bubble, and even a bubble in a bubble.” The son of two medical doctors, Macron grew up in Amiens’s richest neighborhood, Henriville, and attended the city’s most prestigious school, a private Jesuit establishment called La Providence.“It’s all well and good that he did his mea culpa, but behind that, there are still people without jobs,” said Frédéric Chantrelle, 53, one of the last three Whirlpool workers still employed at the plant. A court ruled last year that the company had to rehire them because the factory was not closed for economic reasons.In the otherwise abandoned 17-hectare facility, they punch in and walk through a labyrinth of dark and cold corridors to reach the few heated rooms where they spend their days.“It’s like a ghost factory,” Chantrelle said. “It’s awe-inspiring, a big site like this emptied of everything.”