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French students march against youth jobs law

Posted on: Thursday, 16 March 2006, 09:30 CST

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)

Source: REUTERS

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