The French president responds to the gilets jaunes

ONLY IN FRANCE, perhaps, would the response to a social rebellion have been a three-month-long national conversation. At the Elysée Palace on April 25th, Emmanuel Macron at last presented the conclusions to his “great national debate”, which has taken him on a town-hall tour of the country and involved 2m responses from ordinary citizens. “We are above all children of the Enlightenment and it’s from debate, discussion, and the capacity to converse and contradict”, declared the philosopher-president, that solutions can be found.

As it turned out, by the time Mr Macron unveiled those solutions, many had already been leaked. His original plan to announce the measures last week was put on hold when Notre Dame cathedral in Paris caught fire. And although he declared a “new act” of his presidency, Mr Macron kept the broad contours of his domestic reform programme intact. This has focused on making France more business-friendly as well as on investing in education and training to improve opportunities and skills. To this end, the president ruled out bringing back the wealth tax, a central demand of the gilets jaunes (yellow jackets) protesters, and announced further measures to cut primary-school class sizes.

Yet Mr Macron has now spent a total of over 92 hours listening to French grievances in a series of public debates around the country. “This period has changed me,” he said, noting a sense of injustice, abandonment and lack of respect, and a suspicion of elites. Policy had to be more “human”. So no more schools or hospitals would be closed on his watch; modest pensions will be inflation-indexed; unpaid alimony payments to single parents will be enforced; and a single public-service office is to be set up to simplify dealings with the French bureaucracy.

Faced with a protest movement that began as a tax rebellion, Mr Macron also promised to lower the tax burden “substantially”. France currently levies a greater share of taxes—48.4% of GDP—than any other country in the European Union. He pledged to make €5bn ($5.6bn) of income-tax cuts, to be financed, or so he promised, by spending cuts and the closing of corporate-tax loopholes. A one-off concession allowing company Christmas bonuses to be paid tax-free, which the president announced last December, will be repeated.

If exasperation at high taxes was part of the trigger for the gilets jaunes, another was anger at the out-of-touch elite. Mr Macron offered answers on this point, too. He will cut the number of deputies by at least 25%, introduce a share (of about 20%) of proportional representation in parliament, decentralise more decision-making to local levels, and add 150 citizens to an assembly that will first look into how to subsidise greener behaviour.

Perhaps most spectacularly—and controversially—Mr Macron promised to abolish the Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA), his own alma mater. Paradoxically, this civil-service training college was set up after the second world war, in order to enforce the meritocratic selection of top French mandarins and put an end to the cronyism of the past. Yet today ENA has become a byword for the elite, a disconnected technocratic way of thinking, and a system that fails to recruit enough people from modest families. A commission will be set up to look into what might replace it.

Mr Macron’s announcements left plenty of unanswered questions, most notably how he will finance the extra tax cuts and spending promises. His earlier measures, themselves costing €10bn, have already pushed up the government’s budget deficit to just over the 3% limit imposed by EU rules. Mr Macron did make it clear that the French would have to work longer over their lifetimes in order to finance pensions. But promises to find savings by closing tax loopholes are a familiar fall-back for any government struggling to make credible spending cuts. As it is, Mr Macron acknowledged that he may not meet his campaign promise to trim 120,000 jobs from the mighty French civil service.

If Mr Macron’s declarations lacked the planned novelty effect, there was nonetheless some surprise at the shift in presidential tone. Often criticised for his haughty governing style and arrogant demeanour, the French president this time managed to mix a touch of humility (“I can do better”) with a more chatty, less formal, even at times comic delivery. He may have been sitting beneath crystal chandeliers, but the ornate desk and monarchical manner had gone, and his seat was a modern white chair.

Will any of this be enough to satisfy the gilets jaunes and calm the protests? For die-hard protesters preparing to return this weekend for their 24th consecutive weekly demonstration, the answer is almost certainly not. Whatever Mr Macron announced would not be enough for the radical core, some of which wants nothing less than to drive him from office.

Yet the president’s message was designed not for the extreme fringe but for those who had what he called “fair demands” from the start. The gilets jaunes movement is tenacious, but is fading on the ground. There were 28,000 on the streets last weekend, down from 280,000 last November. A majority of the French now want the protests to stop, having initially sympathised with them. This is the audience that Mr Macron was speaking to. The French president will have won round neither his entrenched detractors nor his political opponents. But he may have persuaded the sceptical middle-ground that he has listened carefully, and made a genuine effort to respond.