By Julio Godoy
PARIS, Apr 11 2006 (IPS)

The withdrawal of a controversial youth job law following weeks of protests marks a severe setback for the right-wing French ruling party, the Union for a Popular Movement.

The backing down by the government in the face of protests by students, university professors, unions and opposition parties could hit the ruling party hard ahead of the presidential elections due early next year.

President Jacques Chirac announced that the work law, CPE after its French name, would be replaced by a new package of measures to improve integration of young employment seekers into the labour market without eroding their desire for job security.

Chirac had signed the new law ten days earlier, but then asked employers not to apply it. Now he has simply abandoned it.

Chirac withdrew the law after two months of massive demonstrations, the largest social protests in a decade. Gérard Aschieri, leader of the French education union FSU called the government retreat an “undeniable triumph of the social movement.”

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin had led approval of the law in parliament without consulting unions and other workers associations. De Villepin refused to give up or modify the CPE despite evident popular discontent.

The CPE, the “easy hire, easy fire plan” as the opposition called it, provided for a two-year probation for job seekers under 26 years of age. During this period, employers would be allowed to fire workers without due notice and without offering any explanation.

De Villepin argued that this plan was intended to help the young find a job. France has 20 percent unemployment among youth under 26 years of age.

Francois Dubet, social researcher at the School of High Studies on Social Sciences in Paris says the protest was justified because “young employment seekers have become the only adjustment variable in the labour market.” French youth came to fear a “programmed degradation of their social status” under the law, Dubet told IPS.

Immigrant youth who face racial segregation have even less of a chance of finding a promising job, Dubet said. Now middle class youth came to fear social segregation, arising from neo-liberal labour market norms, he said. The CPE in effect institutionalised job insecurity for all.

Many analysts believe that De Villepin’s chances of running for the post of president in 2007 have been shattered by the CPE. In an editorial commentary for the daily Liberation, Antoine Gaudemar argued that De Villepin should quit the government, and accused Chirac of provoking an institutional crisis by first signing the CPE and then “throwing it into the garbage can.”

The Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) itself could feel the loss; other UMP probables such as minister of the interior Nicolas Sarkozy could also feel the outcome of the government surrender in the face of popular protest. With less than a year to go until the elections of 2007, it seems likely that the student and union opposition to the CPE will have an electoral outcome.

The government had provoked a similar crisis in the winter of 1995. After trying to introduce radical welfare and pension benefits reductions, the Chirac government of the time caved in before union protests. Less than two years later Chirac’s party lost the parliamentary elections, and Chirac as head of state had to share power with a Socialist- dominated parliament until 2002.

“As in 1995, this crisis will again leave profound traces, because it constitutes an enormous mess for which Jacques Chirac, Dominique de Villepin and Nicolas Sarkozy carry the whole responsibility,” said Francois Hollande, leader of the main opposition Socialist Party. “Now it is up to us Socialists to propose the appropriate answers to the problems of French society.”

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