Uber Files put Macron's neoliberalism in the spotlight

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Mathilde Panot, the parliamentary leader of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise party, said Macron had presided over the “pillage of the country” and had been an agent for a “U.S. multinational aiming to permanently deregulate labor law.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com//world/2022/07/12/neoliberalism-uber-files-france-macron/



In 2017, newly-elected French President Emmanuel Macron trumpeted a new vision for his country’s economic future. “I want France to be a start-up nation,” he said, voicing his desire then to make France a competitive tech player on the world stage and to usher in a flourishing of Silicon Valley-style enterprises. Half a decade later, Macron can point to a record of success. In January, he hailed the emergence of 25 French tech “unicorns” — now each valued over $1 billion — comfortably ahead of his own earlier target of having 25 such companies by 2025. By 2019, once-notoriously statist France had already become the leading destination for foreign investment in all of Europe.

This was in part thanks to liberalizing measures the French president pushed through, including cuts to the corporate tax rate, a flat tax on capital gains and the streamlining of France’s labor code that made it easier to hire and fire employees. Macron’s government helped encourage billions of dollars worth of foreign investment into the tech sector and offered generous tax credits to certain types of tech businesses. “American funds were afraid of France for mythical reasons: the taxes, the strikes, a lot of fantasies,” Romain Lavault, general partner at Partech Ventures in Paris, told Bloomberg News last year. “They have been courted, and it’s worked.”

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His political opponents, who battled Macron in a bruising presidential and parliamentary election cycle this year, long resented Macron’s approach. They argued that it sundered France’s social solidarity and drove deeper economic inequality. Far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon decried what he dubbed the “Uberization” of French society — invoking the U.S. ride-share leviathan as part of a catchall descriptor for Macron’s perceived assault on French worker rights in the service of the interests of wealthy elites.

Until this week, we didn’t quite know how on the nose that term was. Amid a slew of revelations contained within a mammoth leak of documents is considerable evidence of Macron’s cozy dealings with Uber while serving as France’s economy minister from 2014 to 2016. As my colleague Rick Noack noted: “Macron’s backing went far beyond what has been known publicly and on occasion conflicted with the policies of the leftist government he served.”

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