From the newspaper Libération, 17 March 2006
CPE, the magnificent unanimity
Daniel Schneidermann
What a week! Moral is good. Spring is coming. Victory is in sight. The horizon is clear. Each morning the radio tells us that the movement is growing. The enemy has been designated: the infamous Villepin and his CPE. Nothing for improving the morale of the nation like a great unanimous combat. All of France is nothing but a vast resistance movement. In the front line, all the young people. The university students, of course, pulling after them the high school students, who in their turn are soon going after the junior high students. But not alone. The whole country, the polls attest, repeat, trumpet, and the polls cannot be wrong, as we all know, the whole country is in an uproar. Each morning some bastion falls.
The Left, all the Left, is magnificently reunited. Bernard Thibault obviously. Chérèque too, who has just explained that this Villepin, decidedly, is not a man of his word. Hollande, Fabius, Royal, Strauss-Kahn are marching hand in hand. But not alone. One feels that resistance is gaining on the Right. One morning, we learn that the former Giscard minister Hervé de Charrette has joined the rebellion. There he is on all the stages, a hundred microphones stretched toward him, since when has he had such excitement? Without speaking of all those who secretly feel close to the movement. A heartbeat away from taking to the resistance, Laurence Parisot didn't renounce that till the last minute, it is murmured that it is the fault of the Fédération patronale de la métallurgie. That is just a delayed game. A good part of the government encourages us behind the scenes. It seems that Borloo burns to join us. That Sarkozy is thinking about it too. Besides, the television stations have taken a cruel pleasure in showing the spokesman for the UMP, his nose in his socks, obliged to pretend to support the CPE. As for Chirac, one certainly feels that if he were free to express himself, he too....
If all these images, all these rumors come to us, it's because for once the media are on the right side: ours. They are passionate. Those first days of combat are good and forgotten, when the press, caught up in its bird flu and chikungunya [epidemic in La Réunion], superbly ignored the first university strikes. It is good and forgotten, the usual bow at eight p.m. to all the government's wonderful plans. PPDA [Patrick Poivre d'Arvor] is with us, who sent the entire staff of TF1 to the heart of the demonstrations. No connection, of course, with the ostensible silence of Sarkozy. Those who think that TF1 says out loud what Sarkozy is thinking certainly don't understand the independence of the media.
And the sempiternal complaints of the editorialists on the impossibility of reform, that French illness, where has it gone? "You don't reform, you have no courage, you surrender to the street, it's no wonder this country is in such bad shape!"-- where did that line go? Another one, temporarily, is replacing it: "When is he finally going to give in, this Villepin who didn't consult anyone?" In Libération, Alain Duhamel understands that Villepin was a "casting error." On RTL, Jean-Michel Aphatie reads quotations from Villepin, extracts from the latest book by Giesbert, to the spokeswoman of the UMP, Valérie Pécresse: "France wants one to take her. It's an itch in her pelvis. Whoever wins her at the next election, it won't be a permanent politician, but a seasonal worker, a rascal, a marauder." And Aphatie confides on his blog that Pécresse, coming out of the studio, reacted: "I hate that phrase, that way of speaking." Pécresse with us!
Of course, everything could happen differently. One could discuss it, this CPE. One could ask the employers, and the young employees. One could shine a spotlight on the precariousness which, in the shadow, extends its social and psychological ravages. One could imagine that the CPE could be, in certain cases, an adaptive response, but ineffectual and humiliating in other cases. One could ask what young people with no diplomas think, those who have nothing on the horizon but rejection and unemployment. One won't know anything about that. When cars aren't burning, the suburbs are of little interest.
Alone, at the beginning of the week, Le Parisien went out to meet a handful of youths from the suburbs, in a cafeteria in Mureaux (Yvelines). "Two years trial period? That's not too bad. When you don't have a job, it's still better than nothing," says Moussa, 19.
"We don't have anything. Nothing from nothing. So even if the trial period lasted ten years, it's not a problem: I'd sign right away," adds Malik...who has never worked. And Rachid...: "For a boss, it's more reassuring. He'll be more likely to take the risk of hiring kids like us when he says to himself, 'If it doesn't work out, I can always fire them.'"
Who says these words? In themselves, not much. They obviously don't suffice to legitimize the CPE. No one can know if they are representative. But one doesn't hear this tonality in the concert around us....The hour is one of Unanimous Resistance and all its charms. Let's not disturb it.
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