TIME Europe Magazine: A Strange Kind of Revolution -- Apr. 03, 2006

TIME Europe Magazine: A Strange Kind of Revolution -- Apr. 03, 2006: "It's all going to blow up.' this prophecy, which often comes up in French conversations, suggests that we understand our own history. Indeed, in France — where the word consensus is not exactly common usage, and the word reformist is considered an insult — confrontation always seems inevitable. Whether the First Employment Contract (cpe), the measure intended to encourage job creation by allowing employers to more easily dismiss the young staffers they take on, is good or bad is beside the point. It took an unusual degree of blindness for Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin to think that the French, who said non to the European constitution, would approve of this 'reform.' After all, it has revealed to young people the extent to which they have been victims of their elders, who have hoarded generous social benefits for the last 20 years. Financing those benefits has created a debt whose annual interest approaches France's total annual income-tax revenues. Against this backdrop, Villepin has managed to drive onto the streets not just youth who are locked out of the labor market, but also civil-servant trade unions, which habitually block reform on the pretext of resistance against what they sloppily label 'ultraliberalism.' "