Strong Headwinds Are Making France a Stormy Sea
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- Published on Thursday, 02 June 2016 00:00
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1263 .... June 2, 2016
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Strong Headwinds Are Making France a Stormy Sea
Léon Crémieux
"The 49-3 is a brutality. The 49-3 is a denial of democracy." Despite French President François Hollande's opinions on this article of the French constitution in 2006, his government under Manuel Valls (who had himself been among the MPs proposing it be suppressed in 2008) used it to force through the unpopular law proposed by Minister for Labour Myriam El Khomri on May 10. This provoked an immediate reaction from the coordinating committee of workers’ and students’ unions calling days of national mobilization and strikes on May 12, May 17, May 19, to continue on May 26 and June 14.
This article, originally written just before the government's decision to use the 49-3, explains... the development of the movement against the El Khomri law up to that point. It was updated on 24 May.
France has entered a new situation since the beginning of March. Previously it was dominated by the political polarization exerted by National Front and the parallel rise of the ‘national security’ climate following the terrorist attacks in January and November 2015. None of these elements has been cancelled out and you would have to be blind to think that all of that had been swept away by the present movement.
But the key political event of recent weeks is that despite these two elements, which weigh heavily on political and social life, there has developed a multifaceted mobilization which already deserves to be compared with the great mobilizations of workers and youth over the last fifteen years: those of 2003, 2006 and 2010.
