Leader of France's extreme left hopes strike will spark a revolution, writes Ben Hallin Paris
HUNDREDS OF thousands of French workers will stage a one-day national strike today, calling for an end to job cuts, a reversal of the government’s reform programme and higher welfare payments to help soften the economic crisis.
Olivier Besancenot has set his sights a little higher. The young leader of France’s extreme left is hoping the strike will be the first step towards another French revolution as the recession bites and protests multiply across Europe’s second-largest economy. “We want the established powers to be blown apart,” Besancenot says.
From a shabby and anonymous former print works on the edge of Paris which serves as his headquarters, the 34-year-old Trotskyist postman plans to exploit the economic crisis to overturn capitalism, bringing down President Nicolas Sarkozy’s centre-right government on the way. “There is a torrent of industrial disputes and social protests,” he says. “But they all remain separate from each other. What we need to do is bring all this together in one massive movement of dissent.”
To many outside observers, Besancenot’s words may sound like a throwback to France’s revolutionary tradition and to its enduring fixation with Marxism.
But his vow to bring about a “new May ’68” will set alarm bells ringing in Paris, where the political establishment is deeply marked by the events of 40 years ago when students protests combined with the biggest general strike in decades. Centre-right governments were forced to retreat by big protests movements in 1995 and 2005. Sarkozy is anxious to avoid such a fate. He shelved education reform that triggered protests among high school students.
Today’s strike, if widely followed, could mark the beginning of a broad-based anti-government movement. The government is already concerned by signs of radicalisation. SUD, a hardline union movement with links to Besancenot, caused chaos for Parisian commuters during a month of industrial action, including a new weapon: the 59-minute strike.
Next month Besancenot will launch the New Anticapitalist party, an attempt to corral the fractious extreme left into a single movement. “We are going to reinvent and re-establish the anticapitalist project,” he says. “We want to stick back together all of the radical elements of the workers’ movement, something that has proved impossible for more than 20 years because of historical and personal differences.”
But Besancenot is no shadowy agitator. He is one of the most popular opposition politicians and is often regarded as Sarkozy’s most effective adversary. He has become the acceptable face of French extremist politics. Opinion polls say as many as 10 per cent of voters would back him in a presidential election.