Chirac to speak on France jobs protests

Paris, Mar 14: French President Jacques Chirac will back a youth job law that has turned into a political crisis for his Prime Minister, aides said, as students mustered today (Mar 14, 2006) for fresh protests against the measure.

Demonstrations were planned in Paris and around France to demand the withdrawal of the CPE 'first job contract', the latest in a series of rolling actions that have disrupted as many as 52 of France's 84 higher education faculties.

The contract, which aims to encourage firms to hire young people, has become the most serious test of Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin's 10 months in office and prompted speculation about his future.

Left wing parties, unions and students say the measure would increase job insecurity by making it easier to fire young people and demand it be scrapped as a precondition for broader talks on cutting youth unemployment. Some 23 per cent of French aged under 26 are jobless.

Dozens of students briefly clashed with police in Paris yesterday while trying to occupy an institute close to the Sorbonne University, birthplace of the 1968 uprising that shocked France.

Riot police evicted sit-in students there at the weekend.

''We are not asking for the resignation of the government, we're not asking for the resignation of Villepin or of Chirac,'' Bruno Juillard, head of the UNEF students' union, which has spearheaded the protests, said on France 2 television.

''What young people want now is the withdrawal of the CPE, nothing else.'' Demonstrations are watched nervously by governments in France because street protests in 1995 are widely seen as having been responsible for the defeat of conservative Prime Minister Alain Juppe in snap elections two years later.

Chirac, 73, was in Germany today for a joint cabinet meeting of the French and German governments.

The Le Figaro daily quoted chief of staff Frederic Salat-Baroux as saying Chirac would ''very clearly'' back his prime minister, seen as his preferred successor as president.

''The president will have the chance this week during his activities to reaffirm his support for the CPE,'' one aide told Reuters in Berlin ahead of the joint cabinet session. Chirac had already publicly backed the CPE as a ''very important element'' in the government's overall jobs policy, the aide said.

Commentators said Chirac could use his Berlin news conference to speak out or wait until tomorrow's cabinet meeting.

Villepin, whose prospects for a 2007 presidential bid have been hurt by the youth contract furore, has remained in Paris where the government faces a stormy question time in parliament.

His refusal to make substantive concessions has frustrated some key ministers and undermined support among deputies of the ruling Union for a Popular Movement (UMP).

Deputies close to Villepin rival Nicolas Sarkozy, the interior minister and another presidential hopeful, have urged the government to modify the law.

Villepin's vague promise of talks on secondary issues, made during a Sunday television interview watched by some 11 million people, has only antagonised those demanding the CPE be axed.

Left-wing parliamentarians were to ask the Constitutional Council to strike down the law, a move LCI's veteran television commentator said could ease Villepin's woes.

''With the stroke of a pen, it would erase the source of the dispute and offer the prime minister the least humiliating way out of the crisis,'' Pierre-Luc Seguillon said.

The alternative would be for Chirac to order a fresh reading of the law in parliament or its complete withdrawal, a decision that held grave risks.

''The president, his prime minister and the right would emerge from that scenario in tatters,'' Seguillon said.

REUTERS