France is paralyzed. Since a general strike began on Thursday, planes have been grounded, mail delivery stopped and schools closed, and trains remain in their depots. Even lawyers are staying home. Some 800,000 people took to the street across the country last Thursday, and another major demonstration is planned for today as the strike continues. As one participant put it to the French newspaper Mediapart, the mass mobilizations are meant as a rebuke to “Macron and his world.”

The uprising is in response to President Emmanuel Macron’s proposal to drastically reform France’s pension system. It’s not the first major labor action of Mr. Macron’s presidency: Similar mobilizations followed his plan to revise labor protections in late 2017, as well as his cuts to the national rail service and overhaul of university admissions last spring. But this looks to be the largest. Will it decisively change France’s political landscape?

With such a broad turnout, the labor movement believes it may achieve a repeat of the general strike of 1995, which shut down the country for weeks and forced President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Alain Juppé to abandon a similar pension reform. Union leaders hope that the threat of an economic standstill lasting through the Christmas holidays will give the government no choice but to capitulate and at the same time seriously weaken Mr. Macron’s credibility through the remainder of his presidency.

Mr. Macron — who has long thought himself uniquely capable of succeeding where his predecessors failed — is hoping to weather the storm once again. Despite the frequency of strikes and protests throughout his time in office, opposition parties have failed to convert this anger into a serious political challenge. After the dust has cleared each time, the most likely outcome in the next nationwide elections in 2022 will once again be a choice between Mr. Macron and his technocratic center-right agenda and the far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who is even less popular. Mr. Macron may not be able to avoid being loathed by a large portion of the French public, but if he can outlast the strikers, he may well remain the most palatable option in a field of weak political opposition.