France’s winter of discontent

Press, 6 March 1984, Page 20

France’s winter of discontent

From the “Economist,” London

Everywhere he looks, President Mitterrand of France spies trouble. His administration has in the last few weeks faced protests and marches from farmers, lorry drivers, coal, steel, shipyard and newsprint workers, civil servants and parents of private school pupils, not to mention bomb-plant-ing by autonomists in Guadeloupe and Corsica.

By February 23, a nationwide lorry strike was quickly growing worse and spreading across France’s borders. As Ministers damp down one brush fire, flames burst out elsewhere.

These outbreaks have separate causes. The danger is that they could run together into a single blaze, fanned by one of France’s recurrent bouts of political illtemper. Mr Mitterrand’s Socialists have no bigger task for the moment than to prevent that from happening. Breton farmers set the tone in January by blocking railway lines with flaming trucks, sacking a local government office and seizing consignments of Dutch pork and British beef. At first, the police stood by. Then Mr Mitterrand ordered them to get tough. A precarious peace was achieved by a mixture of coercion (supplied by the Compagnies Republicaines de Securite — the C.R.S. or riot police) and kindness

(shown by the release of rioters and a promise that France would not accept the small farm price rises proposed by the E.E.C. commission). Hardly had the railway lines in Brittany been cleared than the routiers took up the baton. The trouble started with a strike by French and Italian customs officers at either end of the tunnel under Mont Blanc. Hundreds of angry lorry drivers, stuck without food in below-freezing temperatures, turned their trucks around and used them to paralyse traffic on the surrounding roads, which lead to the most popular Alpine holiday resorts. Their roadblocks, set up on February 16, coincided with the school half-term and consigned tens of thousands of would-be skiers to spend a large part of their holidays in vast traffic jams. From its Alpine roots, the lorry drivers’ protest rapidly spread. Old grouses about fuel taxes, limits on the drivers’ hours and the Government’s alleged preference for rail traffic were added to the original complaint On February 18, riot police charged a truck blockade in the Chamonix valley. The next day, drivers set up 117 road blocks in 50 of France’s 94 mainland departments.

On February 21, as the Trans-

port Minister, Mr Charles Fiterman, one of the four Communist members of the Government sat down to talk to the drivers’ leaders, traffic was still heavily blocked at many places across the country, including the Paris ringroad and the main north-south motorway in the Rhone valley. Two days later the number of blockades was reported to have grown to nearly 300, raising the risk of serious disruption and provoking sharp complaints from France’s neighbours. One city that escaped the weekend blockades was Brittany’s capital, Rennes. But it was submerged on February 19 by 200,000 demonstrators protesting against the Government’s plans to increase state control over private schools. The national assembly is due to start debating the Government’s proposals in April The conservative Opposition in the assembly, which has already delayed a controversial Government bill on the press for a month, now means to throw its parliamentary weight against the schools bill. One tactic under consideration is to introduce a separate amendment for each of the 10,000 or so private schools in France.

The Rennes demonstration marked the start of a fight about education which an increasing number of Ministers would like to avoid. But the ardour of the

Socialist rank-and-file, for whom private religious schools have long been a bogey, leaves the Government little choice but to press on. President Mitterrand was expecting 1984 to be the nastiest year for the French Left since it won power in 1981. The trouble the Government most fears is from its own traditional supporters, many of whom are angry about the 12-month-old austerity programme and about impending measures to cut jobs in old industries. In February, rumblings could be heard on both fronts.

Civil servants marched through Paris on February 16 to complain about a drop in real wages. The main public-sector teachers’ union, which has been unusually quiet since 1981, has started making worried noises. These could rise to a howl if its members think the Government might weaken its position on private schools in order to appease the Opposition. In Lorraine, steelworkers have been on the streets and coalminers have gone on strike to stop more job-cutting. Militancy has scarely been discouraged by government decisions to pour up to FFr 3 billion (|360 million) into a lossmaking newsprint plant in Normandy and to divert ship orders to uncompetitive French yards after workers staged sit-ins to protect their jobs. If the Government can deal with the lorry drivers, the current rash

of trouble puts it in no immediate danger. The strident tone taken recently by the conservative Opposition has done it little direct harm. Nor is all the news for Mr Mitterrand bleak. The National Front, the main party on the far Right, which did well in by-elections last year, polled only 4-5 per cent in two local elections on February 19, far below its expectations.

Despite warnings from the Communist party that the roadblocks are being encouraged by forces wanting to undermine the Government, the shivering French lorry drivers cannot yet be likened to their Chilean counterparts, whose strike in 1973 was the first step towards Allende’s fall. What is most worrying for the president is that, in their different ways, the farmers, lorry drivers and shipbuilders are helping to bolster the Opposition’s old claim that the Left, out of power for 23 years, cannot rule with authority.

The Government is straining to show that, to the contrary, it is in full command. But curing each of these separate cases of febrilite, feverishness, seems to generate more bad blood, and further distract the administration from getting to grips with its true task of helping to modernise backward French industry. — Copyright, the “Economist.”