France: Pension reform was the last straw

What’s up with the French? asked Ivan Rioufol in France’s Le Figaro. Trade unions ordered millions of people onto the streets for multiple strikes that have paralyzed the country over the past month. Gas stations ran out of fuel and garbage piled up. Anarchist youth and immigrant gangs seized the opportunity to rampage through the cities, burning cars. The people have been “duped by the ultra-left” into joining a collective hissy fit over a small, and long overdue, economic reform proposed by President Nicolas Sarkozy: raising the retirement age from 60 to 62. The irony is that the same leftists who encourage this mayhem are “to blame for France’s decline.” The country simply cannot afford to maintain an “outdated economic model” already rejected by other European countries.

Spoken like a true stooge of the ruling class, said Jean-Paul Piérot in France’s L’Humanité. Sarkozy is not trying to save the French economy from going bankrupt, he’s merely trying to save his rich cronies—whose companies already benefit from his outrageous tax concessions—by forcing the poor to work into their dotage. Just this summer, for example, Sarkozy’s friend Liliane Bettencourt, the billionaire L’Oreal heiress, got a $60 million tax refund thanks to the president’s “reform.” Yet now he wants to “steal the best two years of retirement” from French workers with his “wicked law.” It’s not only the far left that is appalled by his “arrogance and callousness.” Polls consistently show that two-thirds of the French support the strikes, and three-quarters want the retirement age left alone.

Poor Sarkozy, said French professor Philippe Marlière in the South Africa Cape Times. When he entered office in 2007, he “wanted to be the French JFK,” but now “he looks more like Louis XVI awaiting trial.” While he will probably “escape the guillotine,” his presidency will never recover. The Socialist Party is already saying that it plans to return the retirement age to 60 should it defeat Sarkozy, who has never been less popular, in 2012.

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The president has earned every bit of France’s loathing, said French political scientist Aurelien Mondon in Australia’s Age. During his presidential campaign, Sarkozy said he would “retire to a monastery” after his victory to meditate on how best to serve France. Instead, he partied with his billionaire friends aboard a yacht. Then, as public anger began to rise over economic reforms that helped only the rich, Sarkozy turned to ugly nationalism, trying to “divert the attention of the French” by scapegoating other groups. First, he attacked immigrant youth, calling them “scum.” Then he led a campaign to demonize Muslim women who wear head scarves, claiming that they were undermining the secular state. And most recently, he has turned on the Roma, expelling thousands of them from France. To their credit, the French are rejecting these expressions of “fear and favoritism.” The protests are not just about pensions. “French people of all ages and all classes” desire “a different kind of politics.”