The last few days have felt like good old strike season, with appointments at doctors cancelled, rendezvous missed and cycling turning sportive in deserted bus lanes. Many restaurants are closed in the evening for lack of clientele, theatre actors perform in front of handfuls of spectators, museums feel like ghost cities and shops prove far less busy than usual. All in all, not such an unpleasant experience, but for Christine Lagarde, the economy minister, France is losing €300m a day which is, she says, cataclysmic, sine annual growth may nosedive because of it.
Reports in the media (owned by friends of the president), have been all about "la galére" endured by the French, "taken hostage" by the strikers. The reality, though, of today's demonstrations throughout France is slightly more cheerful. After all, we like demonstrating. For us, it's like a jog in the park: refreshing and energising. Just look at recent demonstrations of student nurses and firemen on strike. By the way, in France, Firemen too have ways of demonstrating: noisily or naked.
President Sarkozy, who has been unusually silent in the last few days, will speak to the nation on Thursday and is likely to announce a package of measures to boost the "purchasing power" of civil servants. What he really doesn't want is for those two social movements, transport workers and civil servants, to unite in discontent into one massive national strike. He knows it'd be the end of him.
Sarkozy has one important thing going for him and that is that the French want him to succeed and to prove that they were right to believe when they elected him that all that France needed to get its mojo back was a willful and hyperactive man who is about doing and not thinking. The French public will thus be at his side if he avoids giving the impression that he is welcoming the confrontation with the strikers and that his reforms are unfair. I don’t believe that the current strikes will break Sarkozy because the strikers chose the wrong moment to strike. They are engaged in a struggle, which they cannot win because Sarkozy knows that he cannot back down and therefore will not back down and because the French are this moment are tired of fighting over reforms, which an increasing number of them believe are not only unavoidable, but also necessary. With the strikers will become more divided and will have to accept that public opinion is not on their side because they will look unreasonable with being unwilling to make sacrifices for the good of the country. In simpler terms, as long as the debate on the French pensions plans remains about fairness and that Sarkozy is able to make the strikers look unwilling to take on their share of the burden to reform France, he will. Thus, the biggest threat to Sarkozy isn’t the possibility that he will lose the current face off with the Unions, but rather that he will win so easily that he will get overconfident over his superpowers and believe that that he can reform France at will, without finesse, and without negotiations.
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