France: Changes in the Political Landscape
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- Published on Saturday, 20 June 2015 22:30
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1131 .... June 21, 2015
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France: Changes in the Political Landscape
François Sabado
The French situation has often been approached as an ‘exception’ in Europe. We speak of the French exception, referring to a history still marked by the French Revolution of 1789. This term covered, in fact: a certain type of social gains, a strong public service, a strong state, a strong and dynamic workers’ movement, a high level of class struggle, social rights and democratic and secular freedoms won through historic popular mobilizations. Although the strong state has been maintained, all the social conquests have been challenged in recent years.
The long period of liberal counter-reforms from the mid-1980s in France, their acceleration with the open crisis in 2008, the austerity policies and corporate social demolition implemented... by the Socialist government of François Hollande, have deconstructed and dismantled what constituted this French exception. It is not a collapse, but a deconstruction, a gradual dismantling.