France doesn’t trust its leaders. What does that mean in a pandemic?

The day after Emmanuel Macron announced a new French lockdown, half my neighbourhood packed into our little park in Paris. The sun had arrived and, after months of grey despair and early-evening curfews, we needed it on our faces.

Customers besieged the local hairdresser and chocolatier. All this was legal, though the characteristic French blend of rulemaking and rule-breaking was also on display: police officers wandered the park chastising maskless sunbathers.

Out of sight were Paris’s illegal apéros, dinner parties and clandestine restaurants. Out of sight, too, were packed hospitals: greater Paris that day had 1,520 patients for its 1,000 or so intensive care beds. People with other illnesses had their operations cancelled.

On average, more than 300 French people have died of Covid-19 daily in 2021 but, as Le Monde notes, it’s as if a plane crashed every day and ever fewer people noticed. Almost the only new imposition of Paris’s lockdown is some home schooling this month. Macron himself says people have grown “weary” of restrictions.

The French pandemic grinds on. Meanwhile the economy is decimated and the tourism industry risks losing another summer. Next April, the far-right leader Marine Le Pen will bid again for the presidency. Where has Covid-19 left France?

Before I go on, a caveat. Anyone writing about France in the “anglosaxon” media these days gets accused of French-bashing. I’m not a good French-basher, certainly not as proficient as most French people. Since moving here in 2002, I’ve seen France make better choices than les anglosaxons: it didn’t fight the Iraq war, inflate an under-regulated financial sector, allow ballooning inequality or hold an airy referendum on Frexit. When Covid-19 arrived, France long outdid les anglosaxons in keeping deaths down and schools open. Its death toll is about 97,000; the UK’s, 127,000.

France’s failures began once vaccines were approved earlier than Macron had anticipated. The European Commission didn’t buy enough supply, but Macron also worried about French demand. Of 140 countries surveyed by Gallup in 2018, France was the most vaccine-sceptical.

Macron couldn’t even hide behind ‘following the science’, because many French people mistrust scientists too

This is a symptom of a bigger problem: French mistrust. Consistently since 1981, fewer than three in 10 French survey respondents say most people can be trusted. That’s half the figure of many northern European countries.

Yet France’s political system, created by Charles de Gaulle, gives the president vast powers over this mistrustful population. Accordingly, citizens have come to behave like the opposition to their elected leader.

France’s formerly complacent rulers now fear their own people. Macron remains haunted by his apparently innocuous decision to raise fuel taxes by a few cents a litre, which sparked the months-long uprising by the gilets jaunes.

Fearful of a repeat, he started the vaccination campaign softly softly. Stage one was to ask care-home residents whether they might perhaps like a vaccine, with a five-day cooling-off period between agreement and jab. In the first week, France injected just 516 people.

French public spending before the pandemic was a world-beating 56 per cent of gross domestic product. That’s higher now, after spending jumped and GDP shrank 8 per cent last year. Yet this enormous state struggled to accomplish something as 20th-century as mass vaccination. Infections rose.

In late January, Macron’s scientific advisers recommended another lockdown. But he didn’t dare upset people. He couldn’t even hide behind “following the science”, because many French people mistrust scientists too. More teleworking would have slowed infections, but some bosses don’t trust staff to work from home. One office near me looks like a museum of 2019: staff at their desks, doors and windows closed.

Yet much of French mistrust turns out to be for show: a socially appropriate response to demonstrate your savvy, but not actually the thinking that guides your behaviour. Look at French “vaccine hesitancy”, which collapsed once vaccines arrived. Sixty-five per cent now say they’ve been vaccinated or are willing to be, 24 points up from November, report the pollsters Ifop.

Actual willingness is probably higher. France has administered about 18 jabs per 100 people, practically the same as Germany, Spain and Italy, suggesting the constraint is supply, not demand. Macron now dares to call for vaccination “morning, noon and evening”. With supplies finally flooding in, and vaccination accelerating, France should achieve herd immunity by late summer.

French anti-system sentiment is overstated, too. Most people dislike Macron, but polls show they dislike other politicians (including Le Pen) even more. The majority seems to want a mainstream president who doesn’t change anything. Macron will probably finish his five-year term with only one major reform: loosening the labour market. For many French voters, immobilisme isn’t the problem. It’s their chosen system.

The president is expected to protect them, especially now. Four in 10 French adults are wards of the state: 3.8 million unemployed and 16.4 million pensioners, who, on average, clock out at 61 and live till 83. The state is also currently subsidising millions of workers’ salaries. All this looks unsustainable, but then we anglosaxon neoliberal French-bashers have been crying wolf about that for decades.

Follow Simon on Twitter @KuperSimon and email him at simon.kuper@ft.com

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