KD Tait
On 18 September, France saw one of the most powerful expressions of working class resistance in recent years: a nationwide general strike and mass demonstrations against Emmanuel Macron’s regime and the looming spending cuts.
From Paris to Marseille, teachers, hospital workers, transport staff, pharmacists, students and public service employees answered the call of the trade unions for coordinated strikes.
Estimates ranged up to one million participants, though authorities placed the figure closer to half that number. Disruptions were widespread. Schools were shut or blockaded, regional trains halted, public services crippled.
In Paris, Nantes, Lyon and beyond, marches filled the streets. Large numbers of police were deployed and in some places there were clashes, though overall violence was contained.
What united the demonstrators was their anger at a system that demands sacrifices from working people to service the debt and bail out the propertied classes. The budget cuts proposed under the ousted Bayrou government — a staggering €44 billion squeeze on public expenditure—are extremely unpopular.
The unions’ slogans were clear: ‘Tax the rich’, ‘No more austerity’ and ‘The streets will write the budget.’
In this mass mobilisation, we witnessed what a one day general strike can still represent: a display of working class power outside the parliamentary cages, a rupture in the legitimacy of the ruling order, and a rehearsal for further escalation.
New prime minister
Barely a week before, President Macron had designated Sébastien Lecornu as his new prime minister, following the collapse of the Bayrou government after a failed confidence vote.
Lecornu, a Macron loyalist, has long been a political insider: a former defence minister, a known figure in Macron’s inner circle, now elevated in the hopes of stability in chaos.
Upon his appointment, Lecornu made modest symbolic gestures. He retracted the plan to eliminate two public holidays (a deeply unpopular measure from Bayrou) and pledged to end ‘lifetime benefits’ for former prime ministers and ministers, as of January 2026.
But there can be no illusions: these were concessions of the margins, aimed at mollifying public rage, not reversing the trajectory of neoliberal austerity.
Lecornu’s government remains incomplete—as of late September, he had not formed a full ministerial team and is taking his time to chart a course amid a fractured parliament.
Moreover, he has declared that he will proceed with a budget aiming to reduce the deficit to 4.7 % of GDP by 2026, signalling continuity rather than change.
From the vantage of the ruling class, Lecornu is a safe candidate—a technocratic, loyal functionary meant to steady the ship in choppy waters. But in the eyes of labour, left parties and radical forces, he inherits a legitimacy crisis born in the streets, not in the corridors of power.
Contradictions
The 18 September strike and Lecornu’s installation expose a stark contradiction. On the one hand, the ruling class is constrained by institutional paralysis and lack of a majority. On the other, the working class is pressing from below with real force.
The regime cannot advance an aggressive neoliberal agenda without provoking retaliatory waves. Yet it cannot back down entirely because its legitimacy is predicated on fiscal discipline, debt service, and global investor confidence.
This moment has potential. The terrain is open. The mass strike has broken the spell of parliamentary normality, and Lecornu must lean on repression, manoeuvres and fragile coalitions to govern. The only way for the working class to turn this crisis in its favour is to refuse to confine its demands to bargaining within parliament.
The unions must escalate with rolling stoppages, generalised sectoral strikes, factory and office occupations, local councils of workers, converging with radical youth and socialist organisations. Every protest must deepen into an organisational break with bourgeois parties.
Lecornu’s regime, like its predecessors, attempts to delegate the conflict into the ‘realm of negotiation’. But negotiation is not a safe harbour; yesterday’s concessions become tomorrow’s betrayals. The lesson of 18 September is that the working class must seize the means of power, not demand a seat at the table, but turn it over.
In summary, 18 September was a clarion call. Lecornu is not a new dawn—he is the latest caretaker of a system in crisis. The real ‘installation’ that matters is the self-organisation of the working class. If the movement fails to grasp that, the regime will survive by turning the anger into reforms that steadfastly preserve its essential character.