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.
MINERAL DEPOSITS: The Pacific nation is looking for new foreign partners after its agreement with Canada’s Metals Co was terminated ‘mutually’ at the end of last year Pacific nation Kiribati says it is exploring a deep-sea mining partnership with China, dangling access to a vast patch of Pacific Ocean harboring coveted metals and minerals. Beijing has been ramping up efforts to court Pacific nations sitting on lucrative seafloor deposits of cobalt, nickel and copper — recently inking a cooperation deal with Cook Islands. Kiribati opened discussions with Chinese Ambassador Zhou Limin (周立民) after a longstanding agreement with leading deep-sea mining outfit The Metals Co fell through. “The talk provides an exciting opportunity to explore potential collaboration for the sustainable exploration of the deep-ocean resources in Kiribati,” the government said
The head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, was sacked yesterday, days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he no longer trusts him, and fallout from a report on the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. “The Government unanimously approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to end ISA Director Ronen Bar’s term of office,” a statement said. He is to leave his post when his successor is appointed by April 10 at the latest, the statement said. Netanyahu on Sunday cited an “ongoing lack of trust” as the reason for moving to dismiss Bar, who joined the agency in 1993. Bar, meant to
Indonesia’s parliament yesterday amended a law to allow members of the military to hold more government roles, despite criticisms that it would expand the armed forces’ role in civilian affairs. The revision to the armed forces law, pushed mainly by Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto’s coalition, was aimed at expanding the military’s role beyond defense in a country long influenced by its armed forces. The amendment has sparked fears of a return to the era of former Indonesian president Suharto, who ex-general Prabowo once served and who used military figures to crack down on dissent. “Now it’s the time for us to ask the
The central Dutch city of Utrecht has installed a “fish doorbell” on a river lock that lets viewers of an online livestream alert authorities to fish being held up as they make their springtime migration to shallow spawning grounds. The idea is simple: An underwater camera at Utrecht’s Weerdsluis lock sends live footage to a Web site. When somebody watching the site sees a fish, they can click a button that sends a screenshot to organizers. When they see enough fish, they alert a water worker who opens the lock to let the fish swim through. Now in its fifth year, the
RSS