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Europe
France grinds to a halt amid protests at Chirac reforms
2003-05-14
The French Street makes itself heard, in a drunken, "we don't want to be treated as individuals," kind of way. Les miserables are upset.
Hundreds of thousands of protesting French workers poured on to the streets yesterday in the largest anti-government demonstrations for almost a decade.
B-b-but Chirac's so loved, right?!
Schools and government offices were closed and public transport was at a standstill as the marchers sought to scare off President Jacques Chirac and his prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, from reforming France's fiercely protected public sector.
Scare tactics, on a Frenchman? Oh yes.
The unions have threatened to shut down the country for weeks if the government does not back off from reforming the pensions system. In Paris, demonstrators marched from the Place de la Republique fired up by beer and pastis.
Does that mean they're pastissed, or pastissed-off? Maybe they're feeling ale-ienated
Members of all the major unions were out in force, doctors and nurses in lab coats and masks, teachers in Che Guevara uniform T-shirts, postmen on their yellow bicycles and burly railwaymen bellowing in the sunshine.
I'll take the nurses, thank you very much. Put the rest in the idiot bin.
"There is a political void in France," said Patrick Pelloux, 39, head of a union for hospital workers. "The politicians have failed to understand the evolution of our society and they are all corrupt. Chirac is the worst."
You got that right, but for the wrong reasons, presumably.
Like many marchers, M Pelloux turned out during last year's presidential elections to protest against Jean-Marie Le Pen, the National Front leader. But now he feels that election was no more than an indicator of France's political vacuum, epitomised by M Chirac. "He is the source of the nothingness," he said.
Not exactly. He's done a lot for France's reputation abroad.
Public transport and the airlines were almost at a standstill yesterday. Scarcely any local trains and only a quarter of the high-speed TGV trains ran. In Paris, more than 90 per cent of bus and Metro employees joined the strike, forcing people to walk, bicycle or share cars to get to work. In all, around 50 towns and cities across France had little or no public transport. The strike by air traffic controllers, customs officers, firemen and other airport personnel meant the cancellation of 80 per cent of domestic flights and serious interruptions to international schedules. Schools were also closed as two thirds of teachers joined the strike.
Depriving the children of education, For The Children (TM)
Regine Linard, 45, a nurse from a Paris hospital, said that yesterday's protest was about much more than pension reform. "It is about the European conception of society. Are we going to be recognised for our work or not?" she said. She said the previous Socialist government, under Lionel Jospin, was just as bad as the present one in terms of standing up for workers. "The real Left is broken," she said. Her observation was borne out by the lack of clear support for the strikes from the Socialist Party, so consumed by infighting that it has almost vanished from political life. Forced to vote for M Chirac by the unique conditions of last year's presidential elections, Mme Linard would now like to see the president "recognise the needs of all the people of the Left who voted for him".
Like a good sound beating with the metaphoricat cluebat?
Jean Graux, 70, a retired Renault factory worker, said he was there for his children and grandchildren, so that they could have the same lack of basic rights rights to a pension as he has. M Graux added: "I'm fine. But as a member of society I must defend what the workers over the years have won. We must hold on to our white elephants rights." The marchers mostly accepted that the pensions system required reform, but disagreed with the government's plans to fix it. Union leaders have called for companies to return more of their profits to workers and for the government to draft its budget to protect the current pensions scheme. But they also point to similar protests throughout Europe as evidence of a public discontent with the European Union's budgetary criteria and social model. M Pelloux said: "We are at a crossroads where we must choose between a society based on individualism or one based on a discredited authoritarian socialist pie-in-the-sky philosophy that anyone with a degree of common sense relised was nonsense from the first half of the last century solidarity within society, egoism versus solidarity." The government, which hopes to achieve a compromise on reform by the end of the month, will meet union leaders again today. Its spokesman, Jean-François Copé, said its mission was to "explain, explain, explain" that the government wanted to save rather than destroy the pensions system.
Sounds like all the explaining in the world isn't going to change the minds of these Marxist fools.
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