Nicolas Sarkozy this week faces the first mass-protests over his handling of the financial crisis and reforms as unions prepare to paralyse France in a general strike, uniting private and public sector workers from schools, hospitals national TV
and radio to postal services, bank clerks and supermarket employees.
Even helicopter pilots and staff from the company that operates the
French stock exchange are taking part.
High school pupils, university
lecturers, lawyers and magistrates will also protest a raft of
Sarkozy's reforms and planned job cuts. Despite the predicted chaos,
one poll found that 70% of French people either support or sympathise
with the strikes.
“Black Thursday” is the first general strike since the French
president's election in 2007. All the leading unions have joined forces
to protest that the government's stimulus plans should focus less on
companies and more on workers' job-protection and purchasing power, as unemployment in France is forecast to reach 10% in 2010. There is a more detailed but bias report by the Guardian's Paris correspondent here.
The strikes follow months of tension after high school students delayed
an education reform with sit-ins, strikes and demonstrations. Earlier
this month a radical union led a strike that shut down Paris's second
biggest railway station, leaving hundreds of thousands of commuters
stranded. In the past two weeks, Sarkozy has criss-crossed the country
giving more than 17 new year speeches, but protesters have been kept in
check by riot police.
It is clear that the wearied people of France are not going to sit back and silently take being pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed and numbered like the British, but are opting for the Icelandic solution, direct action.
The LSE economist Robert Wade – addressing a protest meeting in Reykjavik’s
cinema – recently warned that the world was approaching a new tipping point.
Starting from March-May 2009, we can expect large-scale civil unrest, he
said. “It will be caused by the rise of general awareness throughout
Europe, America and Asia that hundreds of millions of people in rich and
poor countries are experiencing rapidly falling consumption standards; that
the crisis is getting worse not better; and that it has escaped the control
of public authorities, national and international.”
There are riots and direct action taking place right now all across Europe, from Athens to Vilnius, but it appears only in the UK are the population dulled into stupefying silence by a daily diet of fluoridated water, X-Factor, Dead Enders, Jeremy Kyle and BBC news propaganda.
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