ANALYSIS:Trade unions in France are presenting a united front but their action may yet be the remaking of a hitherto weakened president, writes RUADHÁN Mac CORMAIC
IF NICOLAS Sarkozy didn’t already regret his prediction, early last year, that nobody would notice any more when French trade unions called a strike, he surely does now.
When the French president made the remark, the political terrain looked considerably more auspicious from the window of the Élysée Palace. Thanks to its oft-derided but newly modish economic model, the country was withstanding the global recession better than many of its neighbours. The president’s popularity ratings were high after a successful stint as president of the European Council burnished his statesman’s credentials, and now he was enacting one of the vaunted reforms of his presidency: a law that guaranteed minimum service during a strike.
Today, those days could scarcely seem more remote. The economy is stagnant, with endemic unemployment and a huge public deficit having just forced the government to announce one of the toughest austerity budgets in recent French history. A summer that began with the Bettencourt financial scandal and the resignation of two junior ministers (one for spending €12,000 of taxpayers’ money on Cuban cigars) ended in acrimony at home and abroad over the contentious crackdown on Roma migrants.
Sarkozy cuts a beleaguered figure, his popularity at a nadir of 26 per cent and the opposition gleefully taking advantage.
Then, of course, there are the millions who are taking to the streets in opposition to his flagship pension reform. Trade unions and the interior ministry cannot agree on how many people turned out for Tuesday’s nationwide protests – organisers claim 3.5 million, police say 1.2 million – but they do agree that the fourth day of action in a month was the largest since the unions’ campaign began.
The government had hoped that by accelerating the debate on the pensions Bill in the Senate this week it could sap the will of its opponents, and two the Bill’s most contentious elements – a rise in the minimum retirement age from 60 to 62 and in the age at which one can receive a full state pension from 65 to 67 – have already been approved.
Yet the movement seems only to be radicalising. “What the parliament does, the street can undo,” a poster for the Trotskyite Lutte Ouvrière proclaimed at Tuesday’s march in Paris – a sentiment repeated by every one of those who spoke to this reporter.
The government, for its part, insists that there can be no further concessions. Without major changes, it argues, the pensions system would run up annual deficits of €50 billion by 2020. “I’m not denying there were a lot of people in the streets but at the same time what can we do?” labour minister Eric Woerth said yesterday. “Not reform the pension system?”
The government hinted yesterday that it might offer concessions to unions elsewhere, when budget minister François Baroin admitted that the “fiscal shield” – which limits the proportion of a person’s income that can be paid in tax at 50 per cent – had become a “symbol of injustice”. But with both sides standing firm, a decisive showdown may well be looming.
Union members are already voting to renew their strikes one day at a time, with the Paris metro and regional train network disrupted again yesterday and a quarter of staff at the SNCF state railway company walking off the job.
More worrying for the government, strikers have blockaded one of the country’s biggest oil ports and fuel transport has been halted at eight of France’s 12 refineries. Oil industry groups say petrol stations may run low by next week, while television reports yesterday suggested some motorists were already filling jerrycans at the pumps.
One of the ironies of Sarkozy’s predicament over pensions is that he has generally played a strategically shrewd game over the reform. He stuck to a tight schedule, flattered union leaders, held back concessions worth €1 billion on marginal aspects of the plan until after the early protests and made several strong television appearances to sell the package.
His cause was helped by apparent incoherence from the opposition Socialist Party (PS), whose leader Martine Aubry first went on television in January to say that the taboo of raising the retirement age would have to be broken and then hastily reversed and pledged all-out opposition to the reform.
Sarkozy’s problem is that he is seen to have forfeited much of the political capital he needed for his flagship reform elsewhere. His crackdown on Roma camps pleased many on the right, but it also galvanised the left even further. The battle against pensions has clearly come to symbolise wider discontent with the unpopular president; it has been striking, at each of the recent protests in Paris, how much invective has been aimed squarely at Sarkozy himself.
More galling still for the president is that French unions are supposed to be in decline. France has only a third of the union members it had in 1975, leaving its unions with some of the lowest membership rates in the western world. That means that they rely for their legitimacy on the sympathy and support they claim from the population of non-members.
A poll published in the newspaper Le Parisienon Monday showed they have it: 61 per cent were in favour of a "continuous and lasting" strike, while 69 per cent supported Tuesday's planned action.
And yet Sarkozy will reassure himself that while the pain of defeat would be great, the glory of victory could be greater still. There are glimmers of light for the Élysée.
Divisions within the Socialist Party have not gone away, and ministers’ reactions to calls this week by Ségolène Royal for schoolchildren to “descend on the street” was a further sign they feel the PS may be pushed to the left of electability by the unions.
The managing director of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, may be well placed in the polls to challenge Sarkozy for the presidency in 2012, but holding on to those ratings after returning to the domestic fray will be far more difficult for the socialist former finance minister. Then there’s the opportunity to freshen up the government with an impending reshuffle before France takes over the chairmanship of the G8 and G20 in the coming months, giving Sarkozy
the global platform he relishes. Pensions could well do for Sarkozy. But it’s not inconceivable that they could also be the remaking of him.
Ruadhán Mac Cormaic is Paris Correspondent