LE BASKET CASE!
Yet again French unions are rioting. Yet again, the country’s rulers will cave in. And still they lecture us on how to run OUR economy
Nicolas Sarkozy says his country is on the brink of ‘anarchy’
French politics has become a febrile swamp
Off TO france on holiday this summer? If so, you’re in good company: up to 12 million of us are expected to cross the Channel in the next few months.
But should you be looking forward to lazy afternoons nosing around rural markets, playing petanque in village squares and sipping red wine on sun- dappled cafe terraces, then think again.
for if this week’s events are any guide, you’re more likely to spend the time trapped in your car on a french motorway and watching riot policemen battle striking workers beside a barricade of smouldering tyres.
To British eyes, the scenes in france look like a re-enactment of the strike-torn Seventies. With the trade unions in open revolt against the Socialist government’s labour reforms, the crisis has brought the french transport system to a halt and paralysed the nation’s oil refineries and power stations.
By yesterday, the headlines from france sounded like something from some post-apocalyptic fantasy. Outside fuel depots, riot police turned water cannons on striking workers. Other pickets blocked a nuclear submarine base, while strikes brought 16 of france’s nuclear power stations — whose EDF bosses have been handed the contract for Britain’s new Hinkley Point reactor — to a grinding halt.
With just two weeks to go until more than a million spectators arrive for the European football championship, one in three french petrol stations has run out of fuel. And with reports of hundreds of policemen being injured in scuffles with militant pickets, it is little wonder france’s former president, Nicolas Sarkozy, believes his country is on the brink of ‘anarchy’.
You might be forgiven for giving a Gallic shrug and saying: ‘Well, that’s the french for you.’ But the fact that all this seems so unsurprising speaks volumes about the persistent failure of france’s leaders to tackle its chronic political and economic problems.
The immediate cause of the current crisis is very simple. After weeks of wrangling about reforms to france’s notoriously sclerotic labour laws, which make it immensely difficult for firms to lay off their workers or even to negotiate holidays and maternity leave, the prime minister, Manuel Valls, decided to take drastic measures.
With the approval of President francois Hollande, M Valls invoked Article 49-3 of the french constitution to push the reforms through the National Assembly without a vote. This was the cue for unbridled fury from the unions, outraged that their members’ famous privileges might be curtailed in any way.
M Valls and M Hollande, by the way, are Socialists, and the last people likely to go in for gratuitous union-bashing. Yet the fact they were pushed to such an expedient is extremely revealing.
for decades, one government after another has come into office promising radical surgery to modernise france’s antediluvian economy and reduce its appalling unemployment rate, which currently stands at 10 per cent, twice as high as it is in Britain.
for me, at least, all this sounds very familiar. Some 20 years ago, as a student, I spent a year in france working as a school language assistant.
No sooner had I arrived on french soil than everybody walked out on strike. And I mean everybody: teachers, railway workers, librarians, bus drivers, caretakers, civil servants, the lot.
They were motivated not, as I had initially feared, by horror at my arrival, but by fury at the government’s proposed welfare reforms.
Even 20 years ago, it was obvious that france desperately needed radical change, from its grossly overgenerous pensions and bloated public sector to its ludicrously inflexible labour laws. But after weeks of strikes, the government backed down. The then president, Jacques Chirac, preferred to buy off the unions than endanger his personal popularity.
This has been the rule ever since. Every few years, a new president comes into office promising change. Then the inevitable scenes unfold: motionless trains, blockaded petrol stations, burning barricades.
Confronted with the entrenched power of union interests, a succession of presidents and prime ministers has sounded the retreat.
Nicolas Sarkozy talked tough but achieved nothing, while francois Hollande, living up to his nickname ‘Monsieur flanby’ (‘Mr Custard’), has proved incapable even of talking tough.
As a result, france’s labour laws, which date from the days of full employment, act as an antiquated safety blanket, coddling its workers from the new realities of the globalised age.
for the unions, the famous 35-hour week has become sacred, while heavy regulations mean that french employers find it practically impossible to cut workers’ pay or lay them off, no matter how badly they are doing.
Official figures show that french full- time employees put in an average of just 1,476 hours a year, well behind the comparable totals in Britain (1,650), the United States (1,704) or Japan (1,706).
Meanwhile, the swollen public sector accounts for a whopping 56 per cent of french GDP, at least 10 per cent higher than competitors such as Britain and Germany.
for those lucky frenchmen with public-sector jobs, the prospect of a 35-hour working week, early retirement and a whacking great pension might sound delightful. for their younger compatriots, however, it means a lifetime on the dole.
france may be the sixth largest economy in the world, but its youth unemployment rate is simply abysmal. One in four french men and women under the age of 25 is out of work, compared with one in ten of their British neighbours.
One in four! Imagine being a french parent, contemplating those odds for your children. You’d be furious, wouldn’t you?
It is little wonder, then, that french politics has become such a febrile swamp of frustration and resentment. The posturing M Sarkozy was bad enough, but hapless M Hollande has set new standards in failure.
His approval rating currently stands at 14 per cent. And, no, that is not a misprint. No British prime minister — not even John Major or Gordon Brown at their respective nadirs — has ever been held in such contempt by his own people. In part, this explains the terrifying rise of Marine Le Pen, the far-Right front Nationale leader who currently leads opinion polls for the 2017 presidential election.
I still think a Le Pen victory is extremely unlikely — but the fact she commands such popularity speaks volumes about the systemic failure of france’s political establishment.
In essence, france has been living through a 40- year version of Britain’s Seventies — a long saga of strikes, walkouts and defeated governments, with one Gallic statesman after another queuing up to play the parts of Edward Heath and Harold Wilson, but nobody with the guts to play Margaret Thatcher.
The amazing thing is that the french can never resist lecturing us about the failings of our supposedly cut-throat economic model.
Despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of young french men and women have been forced to cross the Channel to find work, their leaders, drawn from a narrow social and intellectual elite, simply cannot bring themselves to admit that their own system has failed.
Yesterday, amid fresh reports of strikes and shortages, M Valls announced that he was considering ‘ improvements’ to his labour reforms.
Seasoned observers of french politics will know exactly what that means. It means retreat.
When in doubt, france’s political elite always reach for the flag. I don’t mean the Tricolore, the proud red-white-and-blue emblem of the Revolution, Napoleon and the Resistance.
I mean, of course, the white flag: the flag of surrender. In the meantime though, Britons’ summer holidays could be ruined.