With his "very serious" glasses and moussed back hair strings, Jack looked France in its television eye yesterday and...

JACQUES CHIRAC PROMULGUE LA LOI SUR LE CPE,
MAIS REPOUSSE SON APPLICATION

LE RETOUR DES LUNETTES
Je Suis Sérieux ! Poisson D'Avril !

That is one big "mais". Jack will sign the CPE into law, but not the CPE that was submitted. He will sign a differnet CPE, an even feebler reform than the feeble original.

PARIS April 1, 2006 (Le Monde) - "But I will also ask the government to prepare two modifications to the law, bearing on the two most contentious points", he hastened to assure. "The two-year [trial] period will be reduced to one year", and "in the event of breach of contract, the right of the young employee to know the reasons will be registered in the new law."

Jack then invited everyone to join in a "great national debate". Apparently it has escaped his notice that just such a debate has been raging in the streets of France for weeks.

Jack asking for this tepid labor reform to be made yet more tepid has neither saved Dom's reform (or presidential hopes) nor satisfied the opposition.

At the anti-CPE, the short speech [8:54] of Jacques Chirac did not convince: the president "made complicated where he was supposed to make simple", François Holland, first secretary of the Parti Socialiste remarked, while the president of the PS denounced the "completely incredible construction [construction abracadabrantesque]" of the presidential announcement. Foremost, the trade unions reiterated in chorus their call for a strike and day of demonstrations Tuesday April 4.

STUDENTS REJECT CHIRAC CONCESSIONS

PARIS April 1, 2006 (Telegraph) - One student leader, Gildas Le Bars, said the president had shown himself "deaf to the concerns of youth".

Bruno Juillard, the president of the UNEF student union, re-jected the notion of negotiating improvements to a contract that devalued young people.

As he spoke, students, lycée pupils and other demonstrators were answering calls for renewed rallies. One union claimed that a decision to ratify the law would amount to a "declaration of war" on the youth of France. Although seen outside France as a modest reform to a rigid labour law, the CPE has aroused widespread anger among the French, uniting the usually divided Left but also meeting opposition from voters generally.

What is the point of conciliation with an unreconcilable opposition?

There is a reason the opposition has invested its energies in opposing something as innocuus as the CPE. And it has little to do with the defects of the bill. In contesting the CPE the Left and Right opposition parties and unions risk nothing. If they failed to win over the public, that's just so much yesterday's news because the CPE is so puny. However if they manage to generate weeks of mischief, well, that's fighting for le modèle social français. The government, on the other hand, must expend enormous political resources to defend a bill that is too timid, too unambitious to accomplish much of anything anyway.

Our guess, Jack seems to be betting the Élysée on the entropic dynamics of mobbing to undo the opposition much as they did in 1968. Either way France loses.

You can watch Jack bob and weave here. You can read Jack's bobbing and weaving here.

PFFT (What is this?): Nice glasses 4 | Rayonnement français 0