French job law 'constitutional'

Students have continued protests by blocking roads and railway lines France's top constitutional body has ruled that a youth employment law which has sparked weeks of protest is legal. The Constitutional Council move clears the way for the bill to be signed into law by President Jacques Chirac.

His prime minister has championed the law - aimed at tackling high levels of youth unemployment.

Mr Chirac will be making one of the trickiest decision of his long political career, says the BBC's Caroline Wyatt in Paris.

Mr Chirac is loath to lose Dominique de Villepin as Prime Minister - he remains his political son and chosen heir for the presidency, our correspondent says.

Universities across the country have been disrupted for weeks by protests over the First Employment Contract (CPE), which would make it easier for employers to fire workers under 26.

Mr Chirac can either put into effect the law, withdraw it, or seek a negotiated solution to the controversial proposal.

Students, unions and left-wing political parties have staged a three-week campaign of strikes and demonstrations against the CPE, which attracted more than one million protesters on Tuesday.

Students and trade unions have called for another one-day strike next Tuesday to try to get the law scrapped.

Groups of up to 100 students continued small-scale demonstrations around the country on Thursday. Some occupied the tracks at Marseille and Rennes railway stations, stopping trains, while others blocked roads, causing traffic queues.

Mr de Villepin has refused to back down, saying the law would create much-needed jobs for youngsters.

More than 20% of French 18- to 25-year-olds are unemployed - more than twice the national average.

Mr de Villepin remains the man at the centre of this storm - determined to ride it out, but caught between forces that are proving impossible to control, says our Paris correspondent.

On one side is the anger on the streets and the fear that this violence will set the suburbs alight again, she says.

But pushing him the other way, she says, is his desire to be the strong man who reformed France - where all his predecessors failed.

Protesters are bitterly opposed to the CPE, which allows employers to end job contracts for workers under 26 at any time during a two-year trial period.

Mr de Villepin has said he is open to talks on employment and possible changes to the contracts, but has not said he will withdraw them.

The government says the law will encourage employers to hire young people, but students fear it will erode job stability.

And In Other News:

French Snipers Rousted From Statue Of Liberty

Give Us Your Poor, Your Tired, Your Huddled Masses - And We'll Carve 'Em Up ... Real Nice

New York, New York – The FBI, acting on tips from Staten Island police, have uncovered a squadron of French guerrilas living in the Statue of Liberty murdering American tourists for over a hundred years. The Gallic fighters, now in their fourth generation inside the monument, are the descendents of a militant anti-American sect of the French which included the Statue's designer, Frederic Bartholdi.

According to Det. Frank Mattingly, the statue's victims are usually tourists whose exact whereabouts aren't known while on vacation. Thusly, leads in the disappearance cases have been few and far between. As it turns out, the victims have been ritualistically bludgeoned inside the symbol of America's goodwill.

At any given time in the last 112 years, there have been between 8 to 20 crack French troops dwelling inside of the monument. They refer to themselves as "torch-bearers." Over the years, several of the militaristic Torchbearer sect have retired from their mission but never revealed the group's secret. The squad occasionally recruited French soldiers in secrecy, and some of the Torchbearers were born to mothers and fathers in the group and were born in the statue itself.

Bartholdi and a group of his anti-American cronies devised the entire idea of the statue as a Trojan horse, whereby the guerrilas inside could indiscriminately murder American citizens with little chance of being caught. FBI have just recently discovered a labyrinthian series of trap doors and secret passageways inside the statue.

The statue was unveiled on October 28, 1886 and presented as a herald of the United States as the "country of the 20th century." A similar monument is still being constructed for the Japanese to be unveiled by French "sculptors" within the next year. Japanese authorities have been notified of the potential peril by the State Department.

The Torchbearers didn't stop simply at murdering visitors inside the monument itself. French frogmen, armed to the teeth, patrol the waters around Staten Island, murdering at least 150 fisherman and boaters in the last 40 years alone. It has also been learned that many souvenir Statue of Liberty cigarette lighters contain small amounts of nitroglycerine, igniting unsuspecting smokers who've been getting a light from "Lady Liberty."

During the early to mid 1980's, tourists found a reprieve from the blood spree of the Torchbearers due to the extensive restoration of the statue for its centennial celebration in 1986. It is not yet known where the sect went during that time, but it has been speculated that they were involved in an ill-fated attempt to open a string of chicken-and-waffle restaurants in the Virgina area.

FBI authorities are not resting now even after the Statue of Liberty has been liberated of its French inhabitants. Agents across the country are scouring national parks and monuments in search of similarly diabolical militias in such unlikely places as Old Faithful, the nostrils on Mount Rushmore, the California missions and also Plymouth Rock. FBI Spokesman Darren Block alleges that the rock itself just may house a legion of fanatical Pilgrims bent on "ridding the country of electricity-using heathens".

I am a little surprised, but not too much.

I thought that the Conseil Constitutionnel might throw Chirac and de Villepin a lifeline for political reasons aiming at the country's stability. Judges sometimes do that sort of thing.

But I also thought that there was no good CONSTITUTIONAL objection to the law. The Constitution isn't violated by the law. The argument was that European labor norms were violated by the law, but that was thin gruel...mostly because it's not really true. Other countries have more liberal labor laws and long trial periods.

I did expect that, under the pressure of strikes and violence, the Conseil might take a political position and offer Chirac the lifeline. But they acted legally, not politically, and didn't.

So, now it really does repose on Chirac.
In this case, I really have no idea what he is going to do.

He's got a bunch of bad choices.
Chirac has been here before. Early in his first term there were similar massive protests, and he caved after a harrowing period of general strike. He knows that if he signs the law, the country will explode.
He knows that if he withdraws it, de Villepin will implode.

The most sensible thing for him to do is to try and dodge his way through by saying that he approves the law, subject to "negotiations", and then shifts the burden over to the unions, the students and the government to figure out how to negotiate.

My sense is that the unions and the students will treat that as the same thing as signing the law, and will explode into a full general strike, and we'll be where we are now.

Dominique de Villepin is the Old King's Favourite.

Chirac simply adores Villepin.
He followed Villepin's bad advice in the early 1990s and called a snap election (at the time, Chirac's party and the right had a majority in Parliament). There was no good reason to do so, but Chirac did it.
And the right lost control of Parliament to Jospin's Socialists. Jospin became the Prime Minister...but Villepin remained Chirac's favourite.

So much so, that Villepin ended up being the French Foreign Minister, right at the time of September 11th. There was Villepin, out there creating a veritable anti-American alliance, again for no discernible good reason. And Chirac backed him.
Of course this has led to nothing but retribution from the United States.

Villepin's reward for this abject performance? Why, to be promoted to Prime Minister!

For a few months, Villepin actually showed some real initiative as PM. I was surprised to see that he actually appeared to have some talent. I thought "Is it possible that he has actually learnt something?"

As it turns out, no, it is not possible.
This explosion was Villepin's doing.
He did not allow the issue to be debated in Parliament. He pressed it immediately to a vote, got his law, and the strikes and the crisis. And now he is talking about toughing it out.

And Chirac? Chirac is apparently still under the spell of his well-coiffed toady. It's embarrassing. Chirac might, at last, ditch his favourite. But I will be surprised if he does. The one man Villepin does seem to be able to lead is the President of France.

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