This isn't just about pensions

Now the truckers are at it too. Since last weekend they’ve been blockading roads to vent their wrath at the pension reform. Oil refinery workers have already barricaded petroleum depots in an effort to stop the supply of petrol to the entire country, and railway workers have been on strike for days. Secondary school and university students are making moves to spearhead the movement. And they all intend to take to the streets again today for the seventh day of nationwide protest to date.

Sociologists have already warned of the risk of a conflagration. The nation’s nerves are raw. Emotions are running high, especially since the wave of strikes produced a martyr in the eyes of the resistance movement: 16-year-old Geoffrey Tidjani, hit by a rubber bullet in clashes between youths and riot police, might be left permanently blind in one eye.

Translated from the German by Eric Rosencrantz

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Debate

The kids are alright

“There is something faintly ridiculous about schoolchildren striking to protect their pensions,” laments Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times. But the strikes in France, he argues, “are causing serious disruption to the economy, with a threat that the country could soon run short of petrol.” With the European crisis as backdrop, and its government five percent in excess of the three percent mooted by the EU’s stability and growth pact, Rachman castigates the French for not seeming “to realise the potential gravity of their situation… Their government’s proposal to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62 is an extremely mild reform – certainly compared with the cuts in wages, pensions and services that are being forced through in other debt-stricken European countries such as Greece, Spain, Ireland and even Britain […] It may need a genuine fiscal crisis finally to persuade the French that, as Margaret Thatcher once put it: ‘There is no alternative.’”

Over at the Guardian, Philippe Marlière takes the opposite view: “The government has patronisingly labelled [the young strikers] as "manipulated kids", but these comments have backfired and served only to galvanise the young… Parents worry about their children's future, so they will not stop them from striking.” “There is a sense of moral outrage,” he argues, “at the imposition of a neoliberal medicine to cure an illness caused by the same neoliberal policies. The French are not hostile to reforms: they just demand those that redistribute wealth and allocate resources to those who need it the most.