In his first year as President of France, Emmanuel Macron has managed to push forward a robust series of reforms with only minimal opposition. He has benefited politically from the highly unusual parliamentary elections of June 2017, which brought about the disintegration of France’s historical political parties, both Gaullist and Socialist. The extreme movements on both Left and Right were unable to capitalize on the opportunity, and that opened the way for a decisive new centrist push. Instead of compromising with the old establishment, Macron used his electoral mandate to poach talent for a government he owns in full. The hard-charging executive thus assembled could rely on an absolute parliamentary majority of amateur politicians assembled at the 11^th hour into Macron’s fledgling party, La République en Marche. They all owe everything to Macron, such that the young President now boasts a mandate unseen since Charles de Gaulle took power at the very beginning of the Fifth Republic.

The only locus of power in the country still capable of standing against him are the trade unions, which waited ten months before throwing down the expected gauntlet. The pretext is a reform ending the monopoly of the national railroad, a state-owned enterprise that has historically been a bastion of communist atavism. The rolling strike that the unions have called in order to maximize disruption but minimize lost wages is intended for the long haul. It has been carefully prepared for months, with a preemptive communication campaign challenging the French public’s perception that railroad workers enjoy extraordinary pay and benefits, including retirement with full pension at age 50. The railroad pension plan, a little more complex than that yet unequivocally generous, has required more than €3.3 billion in subsidies from taxpayers each year since 2015.¹

This strike will cause pain at a time when the French are enjoying long weekends with the advent of spring weather, and it will test the likeability of the President. France has known many aspiring reformers before him, up-and-coming ministers whose names became attached to reform bills, then watched as street protests and traffic blockades shattered their careers. Even when public opinion is not particularly sympathetic to strikers, the government ends up being blamed for the disruption—such, perhaps, is the burden of the Colbertist legacy of the centralized state.

The perfect storm is upon Macron, for the railroad action coincides with a strike at Air France, the national airline, and student-led university shutdowns across the country. It is the long-awaited test. Will he pass it?

In 1984-85, Margaret Thatcher faced down a massive miners’ strike. This seminal event in British history has inspired a flurry of books and movies, and cemented Thatcher’s reputation as a heartless villain. All the same, it broke the power of the unions and forced a deep, market-friendly reformation of the Labour Party, which gave birth to Blairism. Arguably, the new, dynamic, service-sector-centric England of the 1990s only exists thanks to this episode. So many are asking the obvious question: Can Macron be like Thatcher, or, more profoundly, can France be like Britain?

Even more is at stake than France’s future (or Macron’s presidency), because that future will impact Europe and its stuck-between-floors Union. On the one hand, the Brexit process has been very favorable to the European Union, which has had the upper hand throughout the negotiations and stands to gain from the divorce; whereas Theresa May seems perpetually on the back foot as the English public struggles with second thoughts. On the other hand, Macron stands alone on the Continent in his determination to develop Europe as a pillar of strength and stability in a changing world. The ambitious vision he laid out this past September, with programmatic speeches in Athens and Paris, seemed to dissipate quickly after the inconclusive German elections that deprived Europe’s power of reference of a proper government for months. And then, when the Euro-friendly German socialists finally and reluctantly agreed to renew their coalition with Merkel, Italian voters gave a majority of the seats in parliament to parties hostile to Europe. Rather than being the herald of a new era for the Union, Macron today seems more like the orphaned child prodigy of the old European order, cast away in a rising tide of populism and nationalism.

Populism is a catchall word that, in essence, condescendingly describes a political platform that is popular with the masses and abhorrent to the elites of a country. In Europe today, unlike in the United States, there is broad unanimity on issues such as the environment, weapons control, public health, and education. The tension between populists and elites crystallizes instead around issues of neoliberalism.

First and foremost among the points of contention is the free movement of people: Populism is fiercely against immigrants, mainly but not only Muslims. Second in the running, but not by much, is the free market for goods and services. Populists instinctively favor minimal competition and national preference as a way to preserve standards of living widely believed to have been eroded first by a “small” globalization, in the form of European integration, and then by the “big” globalization that somewhat overlapped it. This is why Macron’s attempt to revoke the monopoly on rail transportation, established in 1937 by the hard-Left Popular Front government, is emblematic of the great battle at the heart of Europe today.

Europe has been struggling for a decade now. A financial crisis in the wake of the 2008 stock market collapse was followed by a refugee crisis in the wake of the so-called Arab Spring, with both now merging into a nationalist crisis that threatens the unity of Europe and of individual European states. Brexit, the proto-fascist Orbán regime in Hungary, and the Catalan referendum are all manifestations of the same undercurrents.

The disaffection the European electorate feels toward their Union is roughly commensurate with their underestimation of international volatility. It is not for lack of information. The rise of Xi’s China (and of Xi in China) has been widely covered by the media, and the nasty shenanigans of Vladimir Putin are a weekly staple of news reports. Turkey, once a quasi-democracy considered suitable by many for integration into the Union, is far down the road to becoming a Middle Eastern autocracy of the worse kind. The Arab Spring has not much helped the cause of democratization or liberalism in the Mediterranean either, except modestly in Tunisia, but has instead strengthened the forces of repression. And this time, amid all those threats, European nations cannot count on the protection of the United States as they have since Franklin Roosevelt was President.

European leaders and diplomats, whose job it is to monitor global affairs, are transparently running out the clock, confident that the international system as it emerged at the end of World War II will survive until the return of a more conventional American administration. And just as they did during the Cold War, they still count on America to manage Russia and China. As for the populace, it shows a vivid lack of imagination. Just like their forebears in 1912, Europeans are unable to imagine a world at war. They focus only on what they know, on what speaks to them, and for most that is the hazily conjoined specters of Islamic terrorists and Muslim immigrants. The recent resumption of economic growth, itself no more than a mechanical uptick in the business cycle, is helping this shortsightedness along. As things marginally improve, and the worst seems to have blown over, they rush to indulge in a reactionary nostalgia for a world that never was.

Europe before the Union was not the autarchic, egalitarian, sustainable utopia of fellow white farmers and workers that addled populists from Left and Right imagine. What have Germans who support the AfD, or Italians who support Cinque Stelle, known outside of the European Union that deserves to be the object of nostalgia? Russian totalitarianism in East Germany? Fascist warmongering and Nazi rage for plunder and extermination? The Belle Époque, when millions emigrated to the New World to escape abject poverty, or the subsequent slaughter of those who stayed in the trenches of World War I? Or do they miss the anti-Semitism of Dreyfus’s France and Karl Lueger’s Vienna, quieted in the decades since Europe was built, but resurgent as Europe falters? The history of past generations has been cruel: Europe before the Union was a continent torn by internecine wars, prone to profound recessions, host to authoritarian ideologies, seething with class and ethnic hatreds, and invested in competitive and exploitative imperial projects.

The urge to preserve a questionable past is also at the heart of the strikes that challenge the Macron presidency. A victory for the President would only be a reprieve for the cause of free markets; many dozen more battles lie ahead. But a defeat, especially after a long public struggle, could all but crush the liberal model.

But we must take care not to judge events too quickly. The French President is a fine strategist, and if the resistance proves solid, he may well fold quickly in order to quietly live another day—a course he chose recently when he shut down a decade-long and bitterly contested project for a new airport. He may choose a protracted strategy, and he may prevail.

But if Macron decides to face off against the unions for months, Thatcher-like, he has no other option but to break them, whatever disruptions the French may endure during their lovely season of long weekend getaways. And then we will know if France can be like Britain, at least this once.