French students march against youth jobs law

By Anna Willard and Kerstin Gehmlich

PARIS (Reuters) – Tens of thousands of French university
and school students marched on Thursday to demand the
government scrap a contentious youth jobs law that has badly
hurt the ratings of Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin.

The protests have gathered pace since huge March 7
demonstrations, a sign of hardening opposition to the contract
that has stoked government fears radicals could use the
protests to foment clashes with police.

Organizers said 64 of 84 universities had been disrupted in
some way, and three out of four secondary schools in Paris were
affected. Education officials said the numbers were lower.

“Of course we’re against it. It will enable the bosses to
fire people without any cause,” said high school student Pedro
Amorim, 17, at the main Paris march.

Several hundred students, some with “anti-CPE” daubed on
their faces, marched against the CPE “first job contract,”
banging drums, chanting and blowing whistles.

Villepin has stood fast, saying the measure he railroaded
through parliament will help cut youth unemployment of 23
percent. Ministers have touted a six-monthly review of the
measure in an effort to defuse the crisis.

But student and union leaders have spurned the offer of
talks and say opposition will grow until Villepin backs down.

In the western city of Rennes, 100 students briefly
occupied a town hall while in the southern city of Marseille,
7,000-15,000 students demonstrated. Thousands more gathered for
marches in southwestern Bordeaux.

Trade unions plan another day of action on Saturday and
hope to top the one million supporters that took part in the
March 7 nationwide protests. Police estimates were half that.

FEAR OF VIOLENCE

Demonstrations are watched nervously by governments in
France because street protests in 1995 are widely seen as
having been responsible for the defeat of the then conservative
Prime Minister Alain Juppe in snap elections two years later.

To date, the anti-CPE protests have been largely peaceful,
although nine police were hurt on Tuesday in clashes near the
Sorbonne University in central Paris, a symbol of
student-worker protests that shook France in May 1968.

Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who took a tough line
during suburban riots last year, met police and student
officials earlier in the week to urge demonstrators to be on
the lookout for troublemakers seeking to hijack their protest.

Hostility to the CPE has sent Villepin’s approval ratings
into tailspin, but he says his measure aims to help youths in
tough neighborhoods. Their riots last autumn were in part
blamed on anger over a lack of jobs.

“I will do it to the end because I believe in this
measure,” Villepin said in an interview with Paris Match
magazine.

France’s unemployment rate is one of the highest in Europe
at 9.6 percent and over twice that for under 25-year-olds. It
tops 40 percent in some run-down neighborhoods.

Leftwing lawmakers have mounted a legal challenge, asking
the country’s top court to rule the law as discriminatory and
therefore unconstitutional.

President Jacques Chirac has twice publicly backed the
beleaguered Villepin over the contract, whose thinly-veiled
ambition to run for president next year has taken a heavy blow
with the crisis.

Swelling protests have fueled unease within the ruling
Union for a Popular Majority (UMP) party, where deputies fear
the furor could cost the right presidential and parliamentary
elections next spring.

UMP boss Sarkozy, Villepin’s main conservative rival for
the 2007 contest, has publicly supported the law. But some
deputies close to him have attacked it and others want
compromise.

(additional reporting by Jean Francois Rosnoblet in
Marseille and Pierre-Henri Allain in Rennes)