Riots in France

Actually, there are three schools altogether which have radioed SOS.

Quite funny, though: from what I know personally from schools in the London area and in Berlin, the situation in London is - partly - worse, but considered to be normal ... ...

According to a just online published poll (graphics tomorrow from the print version) by LH2 fpr Libération, Villepin only got 22% (February 37%) acceptance. Chirac is down to 25% as well (from 33%).

Villepin got an even worse result than Raffarin on the eve of the referendum for the EU-constitution.

However, 63% of the [1052] French don't think that the Left has a solution.


Source

France scraps 'hire & fire' law


Apr. 10 - French Prime Minister De Villepin said France will scrap a youth job contract that has provoked weeks of mass street protests and a political crisis for the government.


Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, who has championed the contract and seen his poll ratings plunge as a result, said he regretted that events had shown the contract could not be applied.

He did not spell out implications for his own political future, on the line as a result of his handling of the dispute.Based on the report submitted by the parliamentary groups and those responsible for the majority, I have thus proposed to the president of the republic, and he has accepted it, to replace article 8 of the equal opportunities law with measures to help disadvantaged young people find work. The new law proposal will be presented this morning," de Villepin told journalists following a restrained cabinet meeting held by Jacques Chirac on Monday (April 10) morning.

Changes to the law would address the problem of youth unemployment, which stands at 22 percent, quell the protests and also find a way of saving face for Villepin, commentators said. Details of the new measures were expected later in the day and new legislation could enter parliament as early as this week.

"The necessary conditions of confidence and calm are not there, either among young people, or companies, to allow the application of the First Job Contract (CPE)," Villepin said in a brief televised statement after the meeting with Chirac and other senior ruling conservatives.

Villepin said the contract would be replaced by proposals aimed at disadvantaged young job-seekers and added he would open a discussion "without preconditions" with social partners on the question of how to provide youth unemployment.

The protests, and a perception that Villepin has been unresponsive to voter sentiment over the contract, has damaged the popularity of the prime minister and his hopes of becoming the ruling party's candidate for presidential elections in 2007.

The "easy hire, easy fire" law allows firms to fire workers under 26 without giving a reason during a two-year trial period but it has proved highly unpopular.

Students were planning fresh protest marches on Tuesday (April 11) while several hundred marched through Paris on Sunday (April 09) to demand that classes resume and students end a blockade that has brought many high schools and universities to a standstill.

THE LESSON OF FRANCE'S LABOR PROTESTS.

Balance of Power

by Bernard-Henri Lévy
Only at TNR Online
Post date: 04.11.06

The CPE affair--which concluded yesterday when the French government caved to the demands of protesters and agreed to amend a law that would have made it easier to dismiss young employees--was truly strange.

We had a prime minister who argued that when one is young, it is better to have a job with less security than no job at all. We had youth for whom the very idea of insecurity, the idea of being fired without cause, awakened a fear that petty bureaucrats--vicious, capricious, dissolute--would control their lives. We had a president who, until yesterday, equivocated.

And there were the protesters (some of whom were also youth) who--rather than accepting a chance to negotiate with the government, which they demanded as their right and which was offered to them; rather than doing the dance of "dialogue," which has accompanied all our successful reforms of the last 30 years and which is the only way to reform in France--said: "No, not that. Being heard is not enough; what matters is the movement. What counted, what counts still is the sacred spirit of the group, which must not be broken at any cost and which becomes an end unto itself."

For the protesters, was the CPE merely a pretext, an occasion for mass revolt, a means of changing the world? This logic harkens back to the spirit of '68 and in that sense it offers a certain allure. But it wasn't really the spirit of '68 one saw in these terribly solemn marches to reclaim the right to security, to the 35-hour work week, to a loan for an apartment--the right for the young to become as quickly as possible exactly like the old. Instead it was a kind of demagoguery that not long ago Laurent Dispot called "youthism." The idea is that the street is as good at making law as parliament and that parliament must immediately cede to the demands of the street. The project, in the back of the protesters' minds, is that the masses, or the street, or better yet, the masses in the street, are a legislator with all the necessary legitimacy to undo a law that parliament has made. And now those masses have done exactly that.

Alexis de Tocqueville, one of the theoreticians of this liberalism which, in the time of French communists, German revolutionaries, and Carbonari Italians, was also a beautiful word and a beautiful thing, explained it definitively.

It's possible to gain power, he explained, by being a corrupted power; it's possible to arrive at governance by cutting oneself off from reality and, consequently, to rule by vague intuitions and pure fantasy. And so much the better, therefore, if the people--he usually calls it "popular opinion"--can put the powerful back on the right path.

But beware, he cautions. Popular opinion is another master. Not a sovereign master, of course, but a master nonetheless, one which is no less capricious, no less emotional, no less impatient--in a word, no less arbitrary--than the master it corrects and sometimes even substitutes.

Everything is there in this Tocquevillian conflict: a weak but obstinate power which doesn't reform the country so much as adapts to its fantasies; and a counterpower which, when it dreams of seeing the heads of the leaders roll in the same sawdust as the CPE, when it cries, "Villepin resign, Chirac to prison!," takes up with a Robespierrist imagination that is hardly any better.

Perhaps the lesson of the CPE affair is that--rather than wavering without rest between two extremes (one day the technocrats, the next the guillotiners)--we instead need to initiate dialogue: to use popular opinion to enlighten the legislators and the legislators to mediate the seething anger of popular opinion. And then, from this crisis, some good might come: France, embarrassed before the world, could become--who knows?--one of the rare laboratories that produces the democracy of tomorrow.

The French labor protests are stupid and only reflect the dependency culture produced in France from years of socialistic policies in which the people have grown accustomed to eating from the government trough.

.... and nothing really changed.

I disagree. The French Democracy (or at least that of the Fifth Republic) has been damaged; the principle of Parliamentary democracy, as opposed to mob rule, has been damaged.

.... and nothing really changed.

Badly needed reform of labor regulation in France has been thwarted, preserving the conditions that give the French a perverse combination of high unemployment, the continuing need for foreign workers to do jobs the French won't do, and a growing class of discontented children of earlier immigrants who feel culturally isolated, but who appear to share the childish desire for state protection from everything that evidently infects the French youth as well.

It was this way for the last 60 years...

French MP hunger strike wins deal

A French MP is ending a 39-day hunger strike over a Japanese firm's plans to leave his constituency after a deal was reached with the firm.
Jean Lassalle, 52, has lost 21kg (46lbs) since starting his protest and was admitted to hospital on Friday.

But he agreed to end the protest after Toyal told Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy it would not close its paint factory in Accous in the Pyrenees.

The firm employs about 150 people in Mr Lassalle's constituency.

It planned to open another factory 60km away and the MP feared the Accous site would close, despite the firm's insistence that it would not.

After talks with Mr Sarkozy, Toyal agreed to continue investment in Accous before investing elsewhere.

The interior minister told Europe 1 radio that a "happy ending to this affair" had been reached.

"I sincerely hope that we'll now be able to move on and that everyone will emerge from this affair believing a good job has been done and agreement achieved," he said.

"Once Accous is full, the Toyal company retains the freedom to invest wherever it likes in France. That's the agreement we've reached."