Villepin stands by jobs projects amid protests

French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin refused to back down from his contested youth jobs plan yesterday, despite growing student opposition and the looming threat of a general strike.

After hundreds of thousands took part in mass protests on Saturday, union and student leaders gave Villepin an ultimatum yesterday afternoon to withdraw his controversial First Employment Contract (CPE) or face an escalation of their campaign.

But Villepin told a French youth magazine that he has no intention of abandoning the project, which he said was aimed at improving the lives of young people.

"We have to give the CPE a chance! ... I am convinced that it will work, that it will create new jobs," he told Citato in an interview conducted on Sunday.

Opposition organizers had a meeting scheduled for 5pm in Paris, where they were to announce the next stage of their movement. Union leaders said on Sunday they were ready to call a general strike during the coming days.

French newspapers yesterday all headlined with reports that Villepin had rejected the union deadline, and they spoke of a growing sense of national crisis.

"After the march that drew a million people against the CPE, the prime minister has still no intention of yielding," said the left-wing Liberation, which showed a full-spread photograph of Villepin with his back to the reader.

The right-wing Le Figaro urged Villepin and his ally, President Jacques Chirac, to stand firm, saying that it was a question of democracy.

"A law was adopted by an elected majority. That law is contested by the opposition and the unions. But in a democracy it is not the street but the ballot box that resolves such conflicts," Le Figaro said in an editorial.

An open-ended contract for those under 26 that can be terminated without motivation during a two-year trial period, the CPE was conceived by Villepin as a tool for bringing down France's high levels of youth unemployment, which reaches 50 percent in areas hit by last year's riots.

It was adopted by parliament 10 days ago as part of a wider equal opportunities bill and is now waiting to be written into the statute books.

But the measure has sparked a powerful opposition alliance of unions, students and left-wing parties, who say it is a charter for employer exploitation and a breach of hard-won social rights.

Three days of nationwide demonstrations over the last two weeks have drawn hundreds of thousands onto the streets in protests that on Saturday ended in several hours of running battles in Paris between police and a small minority of rioters.

Most of the country's 85 universities have also been partially or totally shut down by student strikes.

In a sign that the movement could be spreading to younger students, several public high-schools in the southern city of Marseille were shut yesterday.

Sociologist Robert Rochefort told Le Parisien newspaper that the vast majority of student protesters were from middle-class families and that there were few from the poor, high-immigration city suburbs that were the center of the rioting in November last year.

"It is the anguish of the middle classes that is being expressed -- a desire for the status quo, for a return to the French society of 30 years ago," he said.

The struggle over the CPE has turned into the most serious crisis for Villepin since he took office 10 months ago following the debacle over France's rejection of the EU's draft constitution.

Opinion polls over the weekend showed that his satisfaction rating had plunged to 37 percent -- a drop of 15 points in two months.

An LH2 poll in Liberation newspaper yesterday showed that 35 percent of the public want the CPE scrapped and 38 percent said it should be modified.

Seventy-one percent agreed with the statement that France was in a "profound social crisis which will grow in the weeks ahead."