French quagmire

I hate to be caught gloating, but when it comes to the French, and Jack Chirac in particular, it's just too much to ask me not to read this story in the Times UK about Chirac losing a battle of cancelling a holiday without some kind of glee.

THE collapse of President Chirac’s authority will be exposed today when most French people blithely ignore his decision to make Whit Monday a normal working day. ~TimesOnline.co.uk

Is it me or does it seem weird that the French government expects to have the control over what holidays everyone gets to take? Sure, we have national holidays too but the U.S. government doesn't have control over when employees of private business get to take days off.

Although the Bank Holiday has been abolished officially, even state employees are refusing to work. Schools, post offices and museums will close for the day and the state railway network will be offering a reduced service.As if to underline M Chirac’s declining power, his ministers have been unable to impose the reform on their own ministries, which are also stopping work. In the private sector nearly half of French businesses will be on holiday, while the rest will remain open. ~TimesOnline.co.uk

Ok. So the French don't want to work. This is news?

The chaos stems from a government decision to levy a 0.3 per cent corporate tax to fund a €2 billion scheme to help the elderly and the disabled.The tax, introduced after the 2003 heatwave that killed almost 15,000 elderly people in France, was to be financed by a Day of Solidarity, an extra seven-hour working day, which the Government decided would be Whit Monday.

But the first Journée de Solidarité last year turned into a fiasco amid a nationwide wave of strikes and protests. Many workers said that they were in favour of solidarity, but not if it meant losing one of their 11 annual Bank Holidays.

Dominique de Villepin, the Prime Minister, tried to calm the revolt by telling employees that they could put in the extra seven hours at any time during the year. In effect, Whit Monday has become an optional Bank Holiday to be negotiated between staff and management in each firm; a situation that even M de Villepin admits will produce “difficulties and perhaps even incoherence”.

See, this clears up a few things for me. Risky tax schemes are always the culprit. Greedy government. The incompetence of Chirac and his poetic Prime Minister.

But the coup de grace is the very last paragraph. What is Bush's approval rating again?

The chaos is likely to inflict further damage on M Chirac, whose approval rating has plummeted to 17 per cent.

Addendum/postscript for Tuesday 6/6/06:

Found a few more related stories to tack on.

Chirac's long, hard fall
By Jim Geraghty, Wednesday, June 7, 2006
PARIS

In spring 2004 French President Jacques Chirac appeared to be on top of the world. He had vocally and vehemently opposed the invasion of Iraq, aligning himself with the vast majority of French citizens.

Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar backed the war and found himself ousted from office and the two heads of state who led the war, American President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, both faced difficult re-election campaigns. Around the globe, a growing, angry anti-Americanism dominated public debates and Chirac was the face and the hero of that movement.

...Chirac will leave office in spring 2007 with a mess in his wake. By nearly every measure -- economic growth, foreign relations, crime, social policy -- his nation has stumbled while others strode. The adoration over his Iraq war stance didn't last and "Chirac-ism" is exposed as a dissatisfying combination of grandiose rhetoric and hesitant, status quo policies.  ~Pittsburg Tribune

Then there's a movie about Chirac that is essentially devasting and funny.

'A non-authorized biography of the biggest French actor', these are the words Michel Royer and Karl Zero, humorists well-known to the French TV-viewers, used to describe their new satirical movie, which came out in France on the 31st of May. The movie targets none other than the French President Jacques Chirac and shows with images of TV-archives the unlimited cynicism as well as the easy recipes, which allowed him to climb up to the top of the French political hierarchy.

Among the rules, "do the opposite of what one said one was going to do", "beat one's own side" and shake as many hands as possible. In the film, Chirac also admits that he despises voters, has no interest for Europe, nor for the political scene. What he likes is to win elections, but he doesn't know what to do once in power. "It's pitiful, I know."  ~Jurnalo.com

There's this interesting story about how the arrogant French are pissing off other EU members...

The embattled French president, Jacques Chirac, is facing a revolt among EU politicians against French-imposed treaty rules that oblige the European Parliament to travel to Strasbourg every month.

There has long been resentment at the Strasbourg "travelling circus", involving not just aircraft and trains but thundering convoys of lorries carrying parliamentary paperwork, which costs taxpayers more than £130 million a year.

Now, a "perfect storm" of opposition to Strasbourg has formed, after it recently emerged that the city of Strasbourg quietly pocketed £54 million from rent paid by the parliament since 1980 for its Strasbourg office buildings, which are owned by a Dutch pension fund.  ~Telegraph

Gee, this is fun. Incredibly there are more stories. I'd sure like to watch that movie though.

Mr Chirac has made it clear he will use his veto power to block any threat to move the parliament.

The parliament has been obliged to meet in Strasbourg by an article written into the Treaty of Nice, thanks to a deal brokered by John Major in 1992, in return for a

British opt-out on the "social chapter".

The Labour Government later signed up to the social chapter, but France retained its binding treaty article.

Now, in an extraordinary snub to Mr Chirac, Margot Wallstrom, the vice-president of the European Commission in charge of selling the EU to voters, has publicly endorsed the petition drive, offering a link to it from her official internet "blog". She writes: "One can understand and respect the historical background for choosing Strasbourg as the location for the European Parliament - but today the practical problems - and costs! - connected with having two sites is overshadowing the symbolic value of it."

She says a new French president might want to discuss "compensation" for the parliament abandoning Strasbourg. That was a none too subtle reference to speculation that once Mr Chirac heads into retirement next year, his successor may be persuaded to accept an alternative prize for Strasbourg.

Oooh, this one is good.

June 6 (Bloomberg) -- A political scandal dubbed France's Watergate is reviving the nation's flagging newspaper industry.

Sales of Le Monde, the national daily that broke the April 28 story about secret bank accounts and political manipulation, rose 13.8 percent at Paris newsstands in the three weeks ending May 18 from a year earlier. Across France, sales were 6.6 percent higher, said Olivier Biffaud, a Le Monde executive in Paris, in an interview.

``We don't want to seem triumphant, but we were best positioned to make the most of the situation,'' he said.

French President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin feature daily in stories. The case started as a 2004 probe into claims that bribes linked to France's 1991 sale of warships to Taiwan were paid into accounts at Clearstream, a financial clearing house in Luxembourg. The story is driving newspaper sales and may help breathe life into unprofitable Le Monde, Liberation and Le Figaro.  ~Bloomberg.com

[H]egemonic Word count: 1270

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