The Civil War on France’s Left The prime minister thinks his attempt to implement labor reform despite labor unrest is a test case for socialism in power. By Sophie Pedder
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-civil-war-on-frances-left-1465327224
To the casual observer, the drama playing out on the streets of France looks to be following a well-rehearsed script. It features protests and strikes, illegal blockades and burning tires, riot police, torched cars and tear gas. You will know the final act has come when the French government, as in 1995 or 2006, eventually backs down—in this case, over a labor law that would decentralize collective bargaining and undermine France’s rigid 35-hour workweek.
The current stand-off between Paris and its hard-line unions is unusual in one crucial respect. Its protagonists are all from the left. At stake isn’t just a piece of legislation, but control of the Socialist Party and the electoral future of the French left.
At center stage are two figures: Manuel Valls, the reformist Socialist prime minister, and Philippe Martinez, the leader of General Confederation of Labor, or CGT, France’s biggest and most militant union. Both men are in their 50s, of Spanish origin and, incidentally, supporters of the FC Barcelona soccer team. But the similarities stop there.
Not a graduate of France’s elite schools, Mr. Valls has spent more time than most thinking hard about modern social democracy, well before he got his current job. He has called his party passéiste (“outdated”), once campaigned to drop the word “socialist” from its name, and entered politics to support Michel Rocard, a moderate former prime minister, for whom he later worked.
Yet Mr. Valls’s market-friendly version of progressive politics, known as the deuxième gauche (“second left”), has long struggled to impose its ideas on the mainstream left. When he ran in the Socialist presidential primary in 2011, he secured less than 6% of the vote.
Across the burning tires stands Mr. Martinez, a one-time technician at Renault and former member of the French Communist Party, who sports a Mexican moustache and a permanent scowl. He took over the CGT a year ago and so still has a reputation to forge.
Mr. Martinez has taken class warfare to the barricades with bravado and with cause. He faces declining overall membership for unions—less than 3% of French workers belong to the CGT—as well as competition for members and political clout from more moderate unions that back Mr. Valls’s labor law.
The French have a historic sympathy for defiant figures of resistance. The CGT’s red and yellow flag, its megaphone politics and the images of burning braziers on the picket line form part of a romantic, muscular iconography of postwar struggle. Yet the prime minister is betting that the union’s hard-line tactics in reality represent the death throes of a worn-out movement, rather than genuine vigor or popular expression.
It was interesting to hear Mr. Valls, who invited a small group of foreign correspondents to his office last week, treat this conflict as a test case for socialism in power. Either he holds steady and proves that his politics can carry the day, or the left is condemned to obduracy and obsolescence. CONTINUE AT SITE
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