Naima Bouteldja: Expect More Confrontations

Naima Bouteldja is a French journalist and researcher for the Transnational Institute.

Last Saturday, an estimated 1.5 million people surged into France's streets in protest against Dominique de Villepin's faltering Republican government. Sparked by weeks of growing student opposition and of tear-gassed occupations and demonstrations, the current scenes have revived memories of May 1968.

France's universities are once again centre-stage with 64 out of 84 institutions currently blockaded shut with increasing numbers of secondary schools following suit. Just as before, the main players are an angry student population, a battle-hungry police force and an unpopular Republican government. And now, like then, comes the imminent threat of a crippling general strike called by the trade union movement as workers join in the anti-government wave.

But this is perhaps where the comparisons should end. May '68 stemmed from an ideological rejection of conformity to French bourgeois society by its own children, and only mushroomed into a general strike following the brutal repression such opposition engendered.

Hot on the heels of last year's 'Non' against the European Constitution and November's riots, today's uprising is more complex, its denouement far more uncertain. There is, however, no doubt that a 'multitude' of social forces is growing in direct opposition to both the authoritarian market society France has become and the elite that wishes to take the Thatcherite project even further.

The match that lit this latest fuse is the Contrat de Première Embauche (CPE) or 'First Employment Contract', an innocuous sounding law that allows employers to fire the under-26s immediately without reason during the first two years of their employment. For the government, the CPE is deemed necessary to tackle France's chronic 10% unemployment rate, and in particular the fortunes of its under-25s for whom joblessness is more than double the national average. According to the OECD, a young French person takes on average between 8 and 11 years to find a stable job after leaving school or university, compared to an average of 5 years across other OECD countries.

Economists, however, refute the government's claims. Michel Husson of Paris's respected Institute of Economic and Social Research, is adamant: 'there is simply no available evidence to suggest that higher flexibility translates itself into the net creation of long-term employment'. Even employment minister, Jean-Louis Borloo, now publicly concedes that the new contract 'will concern only a small number of new recruitments.'

Armed with such ammunition, the student protesters believe the CPE has little to do with tackling youth unemployment and is instead about further embedding the 'flexploitation' model among a section of society increasingly scapegoated for the ills of France's economy and society.

As sociologist François Dubet explains, the uneasiness is more deep-seated that just job insecurity: "The widespread perception in French society is that the gulf separating those 'inside' society (even if when they are badly paid) from those on the outside (in particular people who live in the suburbs)" has become more accentuated over the past 20 years. The middle class student flirts perilously close to this frontier and amidst unemployment lives in increasing fear that at any moment they too may end up on the wrong side of the line. In this sense, "the anti-CPE movement is for the middle classes what last November's riots were for the suburban youth", whose unemployment rates of 40% in some areas finally became intolerable.

In this context, the government has attempted to play one side of France's youth against the other, saying that the CPE is precisely designed to encourage employers to take on those from deprived areas. But France's ghettoised youth is no one's fool. They know that the CPE is just one part of a package of labour market and law and order measures designed to discipline the young and reverse centuries of social progress. For instance, the government has reduced the minimum legal school leaving age from I6 to 14 in order to revive its apprentice scheme and legalised night work for 15 year olds, removing a law protecting minors first introduced in 1871.

The reforms leave Antoine Germa, a history teacher in Clichy-Sous-Bois where last November's riots began, in no doubt as to the likely impact on the young: "If you are 14 years old, poor and on the margins of society, there is now every chance that your school days are numbered. You might get 13 weeks of education a year; for the rest of the time, you will more than likely be transformed into cheap and flexible labour for employers. The CPE has thus become a symbol of protest against all policies relating to précarisation."

Aida, a 54 year old student who came out on strike with other students from Paris Montreuil University admits: "It's not even that I really support these young protesters but their resistance is in the interests of everyone. The degradation of their working conditions will ultimately spread to others, eventually affecting us all."

This class consciousness explains last weekend's huge national demonstrations in which students were joined not only by trade unionists but also many youths from the troubled banlieues who reject a political discourse that denounces young people as a burden on society, a mere 'variable' to be adjusted in times of crisis.

The protests are also fuelled by a sophisticated understanding of the underlying political game in play, namely de Villepin's race with Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, for the Presidency and their party's aim to present the electorate with 'favourable' short-term official statistics before the next general elections in 2007.

Through his determination to show an inflexible firmness in the face of the student uprising, mirroring Sarkozy's handling of the November riots, de Villepin has backed himself into a corner that he may now not get out of. A recent public opinion poll revealed 68% want the government to repeal the CPE, while 63% support or have sympathy with the movement. Worryingly for de Villepin, the French press is currently sympathetic to the protests and his administration is now faced with the united might of the trade unions who agreed unanimously to hold a day of action with work stoppages, strikes and demonstrations on 28 March.

If the trade union movement doesn't split during negotiations, the government has only two options. Either renounce the law outright, or, to save face, use the constitutional council to the law as unconstitutional and revoke it. But such a retreat will have an immediate casualty. As one government minister has warned: "If de Villepin steps back, he is finished."

Whatever path is chosen, however, the mood of people across different sectors of French society indicates more confrontations ahead with a dramatic political change of direction a distinct possibility. As one of the many bloggers reporting from the unrest warns: 'in 1968, the riots took on another dimension when thousands of young workers decided to go to the centre of Paris to the occupied Sorbonne – the epicentre of the 1968 revolts – to see for themselves who deserved the cobbles-stones, the police or the students. This explains the determination of the Villepin government to expel with such violence the students occupying the buildings of the Sorbonne on the 11th March. Beneath the ashes of the riots in the suburbs burn some embers and we are only in March, not May yet!"