THOUSANDS of students took to the streets in major cities throughout France yesterday in the struggle against Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin’s First Employment Contract (CPE) measures.
The Prime Minister made clear, in a special television broadcast on Sunday, that he will forge ahead with measures to make it easier for employers to sack young workers under the age of 26. President Jacques Chirac was expected to publicly back his fellow Gaullist, de Villepin in a speech in Berlin yesterday.
The CPE is the right-wing, Gaullist government’s response to the youth uprising in the suburbs of major French cities last autumn, when there were nightly confrontations between youth and the riot police for several weeks. The official jobless rate for young people is 23 per cent and in the suburbs it is 50 per cent.
Young people know they have no future at present, but they are not going to accept the CPE because they are not prepared to be used as casual, cheap labour by the employers, who will use them to break down the job security and pay rates of the working class as a whole.
Over the last week, there has been a huge escalation in the struggle against de Villepin’s CPE plan.
On Tuesday March 7, more than a million people took to the streets in 160 demonstrations against the CPE. The UNEF students union reported, last Monday, that 50 universities were on strike and 40 were completely or partially closed, including the giant Nanterre university on the outskirts of Paris.
The student marches yesterday were only the first event in a week of mobilisations, with further student demonstrations planned for tomorrow and on Saturday a ‘Day of Action’ has been called by all the major trade unions, student unions and high school students’ organisations.
The Socialist Party leader Francois Hollande has called on Chirac to intervene and either support de Villepin openly or ‘make the decision the Prime Minister does not want to make’, that is withdraw the CPE measures.
The CGT trade union leader Bernard Thibault said his movement would ‘use all the tools to reiterate the only worthwhile demand – withdrawal of the CPE’.
Bruno Julliard of the UNEF students union said: ‘(de Villepin) said that the law will be applied. My reply is that the street will speak. The Prime Minister has been weakened, and if we push a bit more he will give way.’
These leaders ignore the fact that de Villepin made clear on Sunday that he has no intention of withdrawing his CPE measures.
They avoid the issue that the CPE is an integral part of plans by the Gaullists and the employers to forge ahead with measures to create a cheap-labour workforce and privatise public services, following in the footsteps of British Prime Minister Blair.
Chirac has hesitated because he knows this will inevitably provoke a major confrontation with the working class, threatening not only the Gaullist government and his Presidency, but also the Bonapartist Fifth Republic.
What is emerging is a direct confrontation between the Gaullist regime and millions of youth, students and workers on the streets. The Day of Action on Saturday will mark an important escalation of this battle, uniting millions of workers and youth.
Inspired by the 18th century French Revolution, which at its zenith declared that citizens had the right to carry out revolutionary action, a situation is arising in which ‘the street will speak’, demanding a future for youth, proper jobs and the defence of public services.
All of these things can be achieved only through the overthrow of the de Villepin government and Chirac’s Presidency. In May-June 1968 a general strike finished off President Charles de Gaulle and in December 1995 a public-sector general strike led to the ousting of Gaullist premier Alain Juppé.
The conditions exist today to form councils of action in every district of France to defend youth from state attacks and organise action for jobs and in defence of services. They will provide a base for a Workers Republic to carry out socialist policies and replace the imperialist Fifth Republic.
This is the time to build a revolutionary party in France, a section of the Trotskyist International Committee of the Fourth International, to lead this struggle.