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Thousands of striking French workers hold nationwide protests

25 June 2010 04:26 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. In a depressed and increasingly sour political atmosphere, hundreds of thousands of striking French workers took to the streets in nationwide protests Thursday to complain of government callousness and decry plans to push back the retirement age to 62, APA reports quoting The Washington Post.
The general strike and protest marches were aimed in principle at President Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision to abolish legal retirement at age 60, which many workers have come to regard as an inalienable guarantee of well-being since it was added to France’s lavish social protection system 27 years ago under President FranÃ§ois Mitterrand and his Socialist Party.
But the protests also took on a sharp political edge, directed against Sarkozy’s conservative coalition, following a series of mini-scandals that raised questions about the judgment of his ministers in a time of scarcity and debt. Revelations of the peccadilloes -- one junior minister, for example, charged taxpayers $15,000 for fancy Cuban cigars -- have embarrassed Sarkozy as he repeatedly calls on French people to make sacrifices to overcome the global economic crisis and reduce his government’s deficit.
"The ministers are the ones who should be working more," read a banner carried by protesters in Lyon, one of more than 100 communities in which demonstrators marched.
In addition, the country has sunk into a spell of national blues following the ridicule heaped on its back-biting soccer team at the World Cup tournament in South Africa. The team’s lamentable performance and public bickering were treated here as an affront to France’s national honor; a front-page editorial in the influential Le Monde newspaper compared it to the country’s collapse in the face of German occupation troops in 1940.
"You have tarnished the image of France," Health and Sports Minister Roselyne Bachelot said she told the disgraced players during a den-mother moment in the locker room Tuesday shortly before they were eliminated from competition by a loss to South Africa.
Notorious for trying to do everything at once, Sarkozy at that point grabbed hold of the soccer crisis himself, deciding it required presidential leadership. He convoked an urgent meeting Wednesday at the ElysÃ©e Palace with Prime Minister FranÃ§ois Fillon and Bachelot to review the country’s soccer options.
Then, even as retirement protesters filled Paris streets, he canceled previous appointments to make room for a meeting Thursday with Thierry Henry, the former team captain who, fresh from the plane trip home, wanted to give the president a personal account of its hapless performance and internal quarrels.
But the most serious threat to Sarkozy’s standing seemed to come from revelations concerning Labor Minister Eric Woerth, the man in charge of setting the new retirement rules and getting the country’s workforce to swallow them. According to tape recordings obtained by French news media, Woerth’s wife Florence was employed to help manage the fortune of France’s richest woman, Liliane Bettencourt, at a time when Bettencourt had money stashed in Switzerland to avoid French taxes.
The news was particularly damaging because, before taking on the Labor Ministry and retirement reform, Woerth was Sarkozy’s budget minister -- the official in charge of taxes and a prominent advocate of prosecuting rich evaders. Moreover, it turned out, as budget minister he had pinned a LÃ©gion d’Honneur medal on Bettencourt’s main financial manager shortly before the manager hired Florence Woerth to assist him.
Florence Woerth denied knowing anything about the Swiss accounts, and Bettencourt issued a statement promising to get right with the tax man. Woerth, meanwhile, denounced the revelations as "ignominious" attempts by the Socialist opposition to destabilize his retirement mission and suggested that women’s liberation was being set back by insinuations that his wife got her job because Bettencourt’s money managers were trying to curry favor with the ministry.
Nonetheless, Florence Woerth announced she was resigning from the Bettencourt team.
Alain Joyandet, Sarkozy’s junior minister for foreign aid and French-speaking countries, got in another kind of trouble when the satirical weekly Le Canard EnchainÃ© reported last week that he had profited from political connections to get around zoning restrictions to expand his summer villa on a hill overlooking the tony Riviera resort of St. Tropez.
Joyandet denounced the report as unfair, saying he had the right documents for his exception to the zoning rules. But the newspaper Wednesday published the facsimile of a document in which the community’s urban affairs chief had early on informed the mayor -- Joyandet’s neighbor and political ally -- that the documents presented to get a permit seemed to be false.
Joyandet, who had already been criticized for a $125,000 plane charter at public expense, said at that point that he was abandoning his plans for a second story on the St. Tropez villa. At the same time, Sarkozy’s office announced that the cigar-loving junior minister for greater Paris, Christian Blanc, was being ordered to write a personal check for the luxury smokes. Moreover, ElysÃ©e spokesmen said, the president told all his ministers to cut back on their expenses.
To set the example, Sarkozy decided to cancel this year’s Bastille Day garden party, an annual July 14 gathering of the Paris who’s who on an elegant lawn behind the ElysÃ©e Palace. Last year’s party reportedly cost taxpayers nearly $1 million in champagne and snacks.