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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 174 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 174, April 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
A movement even bigger than that against the poll tax has hit France. Street protests are once again rocking the government, only a year after its crushing electoral victory. The French Tories are being forced onto the defensive by the anger of thousands of school and technical college students. They have taken to the streets to protest at attempts to reduce the SMIC (minimum wage) for youth to 80 percent (to £439 a month).
There has been demonstration after demonstration in Paris and in major provincial cities. The major trade union confederations have called demonstrations of up to 400,000 demanding that the government withdraw the proposal completely.
The situation among young people (nearly a quarter of under-26s lack a job) is like a tinderbox waiting for a match. The protests are also pulling together kids from different ethnic backgrounds, black as well as white.
Many of the demonstrations have spilled over into rioting. One such riot, not connected with the specific issue of the SMIC, occurred in the Paris suburb of Garges-lès-Gonesse over a racist murder. There have been running battles with riot police, with cars overturned and set on fire and shop and restaurant windows broken. The atmosphere is like the campaign against the poll tax. Sympathy for the rioters among workers is widespread.
The effect on the government and its supporters has been a mixture of hysteria and fear. The hard line minister of the interior, Charles Pasqua, targeted the rioting casseurs (smashers) as part of some sinister plot. Other politicians have been nervous about taking too hard a line. There has been much speculation that France is heading for another May 1968.
The government’s attack on the minimum wage is part of its austerity programme. With the economy growing at barely 1 percent this year the French ruling class would like to cut interest rates to stimulate growth but dare not unless the Germans do, for fear of creating the sort of currency crisis that knocked sterling out of the ERM. It wants to cut public spending but fears that this will endanger an already feeble economic growth.
Every time the government has tried to go onto the offensive it has been forced to retreat by opposition. At the end of last year mass strikes at Air France forced the government to shelve its plans for restructuring the airline. Then the government had to backtrack on its intention to inject cash into private education under pressure from widespread opposition. Bitter protest action by fishermen and farmers against the effects of EU agricultural policy and new GATT measures also dented its confidence.
With unemployment at an all time high the government then dreamed up a scheme to get employers to take on young people for less than the minimum rate for a certain period of time in return for some on the job training. It attempted to sell this idea as a scheme for reducing youth unemployment. But it didn’t take long for people to see through it. The youth SMIC would devalue the technical qualifications that many take after completing their school leaving exams, be cheap labour for the employers (to be dismissed as soon as the employer had to pay more) and be a threat to older workers’ position.
The government now gives the impression of having lost control – and not just over economic questions. The most farcical of its retreats came after it attempted to ban live transmission of Lovin’ Fun, a sexually explicit talk show on Fun Radio, which claims 1.3 million young listeners. It took only three days of protest, with 375,000 people ringing in to offer their support and 10,000 demonstrating for the communications minister to assure all and sundry that the government would not interfere with young people’s ‘method of dialogue’.
An opinion poll in early March discovered that 55 percent of all French people and 60 percent of wage earners thought the social and economic situation was poor, while 69 percent believed that a serious social crisis was imminent. Even more worrying for the government was the response to the crisis. No less than 44 percent of all French people and 57 percent of all wage earners would be prepared to join in a general movement of opposition were it to develop. In the event of opposition being purely workplace based the figures went still higher: 69 percent in the public sector, 54 percent in the private sector.
Encouraging though this is, not everything is rosy. Le Pen’s National Front is still capable of pulling large numbers of votes, despite losing (narrowly) in the mayoral by-election for the town of Nice. But the French Tories are looking as weak as their British counterparts and, even if the present upsurge is not a rerun of May 68, French workers and young people are showing powers of political recovery that some had thought lost.
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