Riots in France

Chirac just has made made one of the trickiest decision of his long political career.

Hoping I got it correctly, the French president said, he will sign the law if the government makes two changes:

"I ask the government to immediately prepare modifications over the probation period, which will be reduced to one year"
and
"The right to know the reasons of the dismissal will be registered in the new law".


So the law will be just watered a bit.

In the future I will be very careful to avoid reference data or web site duels with relentless Westphalians.

Told ya! (see page 33).....we now await the Gallic shrug, and the speech to the people.

.....a typical French compromise.

Lots of demos after that tv-speech in France last night, but fortunately not much so much troubles as I feared.

I am very pleased to learn that Chirac will sign the law. Cutting the length of the proabationary period from two to one years is an important but not vital concession. I predict the demonstrations will diminish in intensity and the Villepin government will survive the storm. This will be good for France.

New strikes - supported by other European unions - and big demos will happen on April 4.

This reform of the reform only has one winner it seems: Sarkozy.

Students add new twist to an old French story

France's protesting youths and workers have much in common with the far Right, writes Keelin McDonell

The French love political dramas, but lately the plotlines have all looked suspeciously similar.

The basic trajectory goes something like this: France is contentedly savouring its role as the birthplace of continental democracy and high culture. The country even modernises, just a little, to keep pace with the new global economy and to compete with its ambitious EU partners. Unemployment and a burgeoning Muslim population complicate things, but the reliable social welfare system is there to reassure.

But then, the inciting incident: a renegade politician or party attempts reform. The old way is not enough; anglosaxonisme ?- Gallic shorthand for the US-style free market ?- is declared the order of the day.

But the people won't have it. For once, young and old, Left and Right, native-born Parisian and Algerian immigrant all agree ?- France may be troubled, but who really wants to change it? As popular outrage grows, the spectre of reform slinks away.

In the past year, this frightening menace has been played by, among others, the EU constitution, Englishspeaking tycoons, and most recently the proposed CPE laws, which would loosen up national labour policy enough to allow employers to get round the French legal process when dismissing young workers in their first two years on the job.

And so last Tuesday's massive antiCPE protests and strikes halted trains, stopped newspaper distribution and shut schools and hospitals. The day was dubbed Mardi Noir ?- Black Tuesday ?- by reporters and union leaders, a name that captured the economic devastation but points to an unhappy milestone in economic history. The market's black days of the past ?- in 1929, in 1987 ?- resulted from fiscal recklessness on the part of elites. The villains were robber barons, speculators and junk bond kings. This Mardi Noir was perpetrated by students and workers.

The bond between unions and universities is not unusual. But its intensity in France is. Interest in organised labour has waned among US university students since its peak in the 1960s. But in France the student-worker relationship remains passionate. This partly has to do with the existence of large student unions in the country. Young people learn early to organise?- collective bargaining is practically part of a national catechism. And historically, in France as well as in other countries, the student-union connection has helped to liberalise societies.

Alliances between students and workers married the progressive spirit of the young with the economic grievances of the powerless. The typically privileged university students learned to care for the fate of the uneducated and less fortunate in society, and the typically conservative workers stood up for tolerance and individual liberties.

That combination, though, can hardly be said to exist in the anti-CPE coalition. Students and workers alike are wary of France's minorities, and neither group has put forward an alternative plan to boost employment and secure a place for France in the international economy. Indeed, an infamous Ipsos poll of those aged between 20 and 25 in France last year found 48 per cent of young people associated globalisation with fear.

And the political power of the student-union alliance is, as the French historian Jacques Marseille recently explained to Le Monde newspaper, one of the paradoxes of the Fifth Republic. Young people and workers are less likely to vote than most French citizens, and when they do vote, they are more likely to cast a ballot for a candidate on the extreme Right or Left.

As a voting bloc they hardly wield any power ?- hence the centre-right Government that has steered France for the past dozen years. And yet protesting is such an institutionalised form of participation in the French political process that it can cripple even the most mildly controversial government policy.

MardiNoir staged what is becoming an increasingly common political conflict in France: a battle between industrial reformers who are largely well-heeled middle-aged men, and defenders of the status quo, who are the students and union hard-liners.

Protest, which has served French society well in the past, has become almost threateningly conventional: it's the tactics of the revolution serving the aims of the clergy. So more than a people in uproar, MardiNoir reveals a French progressive movement on the brink of collapse ?- nearly indistinguishable from the country's seething far Right.

The historic anti-CPE demonstrations have so far prompted a historic response from the Government: nothing. Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin invited union chiefs and students to discuss the CPE over the weekend; when few showed up, he made it clear there would be no more overtures for some time.

President Jacques Chirac has kept a low profile. And while Interior Minister and would-be presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy has complained of de Villepin's management, he too has mostly avoided the spotlight. The message is calculated and clear: no to withdrawing the CPE, but also no to letting protesters govern. ?'?' The street'', may have ?'?' taken the place of parliament'', as Marseille put it, but now parliament would like its place back. In a surprising twist on a familiar political drama, reform may yet win.


Kelin McDonell is assistant editor at The New Republic

We (= countries with same problems) will finally have to accept the situation or change EVERYTHING totally.