Is France on the verge of another May '68?

[url=http://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2009/06/france-party-... France on the verge of another May '68?[/url]

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I have been living full-time in Paris for the past four years and reporting from the city for nearly 20. I have, therefore, become accustomed to frequent street protests. But I have never seen anything quite like the anger that has been building up during demonstrations over the past few months against the government of Nicolas Sarkozy. The most recent of these was a protest I attended in Montparnasse on 14 May, which was led by hospital staff angry at proposed health service reforms.

The reforms are based on the so-called "Loi Bachelot" (Bachelot law), named after Roselyne Bachelot-Narquin, the politician in Sarkozy's government who devised the health reforms and is trying to push them through the National Assembly. It rests on the principle that managers will decide the level of medical care appropriate to a particular hospital. This proposal, long familiar as a fact of life to readers in the UK, has provoked a furious reaction from all sections of French society.

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But you don't have to scratch too hard to find real rage lurking beneath the surface - a rage that motivates most of these demonstrators. "We are sick of being told we have no control over our own lives," Rachida Ahloulay, one of the dancing nurses, tells me. "It's not just that the government is giving managers the power over medical staff," she says, "but it means that we are degraded as citizens. And that is why France is on the edge of a serious rebellion. Anger is everywhere!"

This kind of rhetoric is being echoed all over France: in the universities, which are now permanently blockaded by staff and students; in the railway unions; among postal workers; and even in the prison service (warders recently began a series of strikes, which had never happened in France before). Little wonder that the mainstream journal Le Nouvel Observateur recently devoted an entire issue to what it called "The French Insurrection", or that there is now serious talk in most sections of the media of a "New May '68" - a reprise of the strikes and riots that brought France to its knees and almost felled the government of Charles de Gaulle more than 40 years ago.

The unlikely figurehead of this new popular revolt is Olivier Besancenot, a 35-year-old postman from the outskirts of Paris. Besancenot's boyish good looks, fashionable clothes and fluently easy manner on television have made him the nation's favourite revolutionary. Until February of this year, he was a leading figure in the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (the LCR, or Revolutionary Communist League). In what is now looking like a very smart piece of PR, the LCR was then dissolved, re-emerging as the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA, or New Anti-Capitalist Party), a much broader coalition, formed with the aim of contesting the European parliamentary elections in early June.

Besancenot, who is now official spokesman for the NPA (there is no leader), commands a 60 per cent approval rating from French voters right across the political spectrum.

So is France on the verge of another May '68?

I really really really hope so. Out of all the developed countries, France is the country with the best electoral venue for chanelling the popular anger of the working class.

We in Canada have lots to learn from Olivier Besancenot, the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste, and the French left social movements. We fail to learn from them at our own expense.