France: French airports were empty and schools locked shut yesterday, as air traffic controllers and teachers went on strike yet again to protest Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin's plan to reform the French pension system. Lara Marlowe, in Paris, reports
Seventy per cent of all flights to and from French airports were cancelled, including almost all short-haul European flights. But the disruption of travel within Europe was barely remarked on by French media. Most French people knew of the strikes in advance and simply avoided travel. Foreign business people and tourists suffered the greatest inconvenience.
Mr Raffarin is to present the draft law in this morning's cabinet meeting, and it should be presented to the National Assembly on June 10th, in the hope of passing legislation before the Bastille Day holiday on July 14th.
The French Prime Minister's right-wing supporters want him to "break the unions", as Mrs Margaret Thatcher did in Britain. But every recent French government has backed down in the face of industrial action. And the popularity of Mr Raffarin and President Jacques Chirac is falling. French people anticipate the threat of a general strike with dread.
Mr Raffarin's nightmare is that the open-ended railway and metro strikes scheduled to begin on the evening of June 2nd will paralyse the country on the last day of the G-8 Summit in Évian. Mr Chirac has staked a great deal of prestige on the summit.
About one-third of Paris street cleaners and rubbish collectors walked out the past two days, and workers at the EDF electricity company announced they, too, will go on strike on June 3rd, leading to "a significant reduction" in electricity production.
French attention yesterday focused on the teachers' walk-out, which is creating difficulties for working parents.
The country's 800,000 teachers observed their ninth strike of the school year, and at least 30,000 staged a protest march to Les Invalides, a few blocks from Matignon, where Mr Raffarin was holding a crisis meeting with the education and social affairs ministers.
When the meeting ended, the Prime Minister made a major concession to teachers' unions, agreeing to start negotiations on the plan to decentralise 100,000 non-teaching school jobs from Paris.