French President Jacques Chirac must take a firm lead to deal with growing social unrest over new youth employment laws to avoid a major political crisis, French newspapers said yesterday.
Paris and the rest of France saw some of its biggest strike and protest action for decades on Tuesday, with Paris police resorting to water cannon and baton charges to quell the crowds there.
The protesters oppose the plans to allow employers to sack young workers without justification within a planned two-year contract, the First Employment Contract (CPE) which the government says will create jobs.
The newspaper commentators, as many others, see the bigger picture as a debate over the future of France's creaking cradle-to-grave social security system.
A short term fix requires Chirac to take decisive action, most of the French press agreed.
"It is urgent that Chirac, who has left his Prime Minister [Dominique de Villepin] to kill off social dialogue, regain his grip of the situation and assume his rule as final arbiter by withdrawing the CPE," the left-leaning Liberation opined.
Some saw signs of that in the fact the Chirac cancelled a trip outside of Paris to concentrate on the situation.
L'Union daily painted a very grim picture unless the president takes swift and firm action, including the possible dissolution of parliament, a sentiment echoed by France Soir which wrote that "it would be better for the fight to be carried out at the ballot box than in the street."
The British press, while less preoccupied with the trouble across the English Channel, noted that Villepin appeared to be more isolated in his firm stand.
The Times predicted that Chirac would keep a reasonably low profile until after the new job laws have been considered by France's constitutional court today.
In a commentary from Brussels, from where he covers European issues, David Rennie of the Daily Telegraph observed that France's young people are looking backwards in a changing world.
"The students want to turn back the clock to the France of their parents, their grandparents ... This is militant, car-burning nostalgia ... I am not used to living in a place where the future feels like decline," he wrote.
The regional German daily Nurnberger Zeitung said that France's European partners "are looking on with trepidation at the country of the Revolution, where reform plans are threatened with an early death."
Commentators in the International Herald Tribune, published here, spoke of a "baffling French rite of spring."
"The youth of France do not want a new neo-liberal contract," Pepper Culpepper and Peter Hall wrote.
"They want a new social contract that distributes the burdens of a market economy equitably across the populace. Until political parties deliver that kind of compromise, the underlying political crisis will not go away," he added.
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