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Monday, June 09, 2003
posted by gbarto at 3:40 AM:
Be sure to visit Den Beste's site for lots of stuff on the crumbling of France. Den Beste is positing a collapse of the French system, possibly followed by a revolutionary government. I sincerely hope he's wrong. A few things to keep an eye on. Presumably even as I write, negotiations are taking place to make sure the Bac comes off. If it doesn't, universities and students won't know who's eligible to start college next year. If we're lucky, tomorrow's news will only inform that the French education system is in tatters. Successful negotiations would imply a) Raffarin's reforms aren't going, b) Raffarin is weak, c) the unions don't need to worry about the retirement reform battle because they'll win in the end. In an ideal world, tomorrow would conclude with a Reaganesque announcement that the Bac will be given and any teacher not present is not a teacher, hence is fired, à la the Air Traffic Controllers' strike resolution. That won't happen. But if things are still looking very ugly indeed, there is some hope that the unions will be made to back down.Chirac has been playing some very dangerous games this year and this is far and away the most dangerous. If he wins, he'll do what his idol, DeGaulle, couldn't: buck public opinion and make himself master over it anyway. If he loses, we may be back to May 1968. May 1968 does, incidentally, need to be remembered, if only because it involved a very messy situation where France managed not to drag the European continent into war. But, as Den Beste notes, people aren't uniformly as thrilled with what the union movement has been doing as in the past. And while the unions hold a lot of veto power over France doing anything, in the long run they do risk the wrath of the French people. To close down the Bac is to turn off a lot of students with aspirations, not to mention their families and their friends. And as "peace protesters" in San Francisco found out this year, keeping people from getting to work may show your power, but it doesn't always win you friends. The question is whether Chirac and Raffarin can hang on long enough that more people have been hurt by union excesses than helped by unions; the time necessary to do so may not be as great as some might think. So from these shores, the TurkeyBlog's best advice, should Mssrs. Chirac and Raffarin be desperate enough to consult this page (all bets are off for France if it gets that bad!) is to hang tough, keep hanging tough and wait until teachers are angry that there's no bus service to take them to their marching point, bus drivers are angry that their kid's shot at college next fall just went out the window, etc. It's going to get ugly. The question is whether the government will let it get ugly enough for the populace to see what's going on, or whether they'll cave and let the Arlette freak show and other horrors pretend to have saved for today what they'll have surely destroyed for tomorrow.
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