Embattled France

Amidst riots and protests against the youth unemployment law in France, President Chirac's decision has left his government weak and on the defensive, writes Eva Dadrian

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Last week, the French waited to see whether their president would back a controversial youth employment law or call for it to be modified or withdrawn. Championed by Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin to tackle high levels of youth unemployment, the law known as the CPE (Contrat Première Embauche) has sparked mass protests and riots throughout the country for almost a month with political parties as well as trade unions calling for it to be withdrawn.

As Dominique de Villepin refused to back down and strikes and demonstrations escalated, President Chirac took the plunge. Clearing the way through the Constitutional Council for the bill to be signed into law, Chirac promised to modify two of its most controversial clauses: the trial period for youths under 26 would be reduced and employers would need to give a valid reason for any dismissal. President Chirac's promise of a second law was derided by L'Humanité for being "... no more than a pitiful delusion", while La Marseillaise chose to refer to it as the "height of duplicity".

In fact, with the exception of the conservative right- wing Le Figaro (1 April, 2006) which wrote that "The head of state needed to put an end to the drama created by his prime minister and find a prompt remedy for a crisis strategy that was not working. He has done this", most newspapers were dismissive of Chirac's greyish decision. In an editorial on the same day, L'Ardenais wrote "Chirac makes two concessions but solves nothing". Such short and sharp criticism was also to be found in France-Soir whose editors noted that "All he has done is to annoy all the French: both the right-wing voters, who are upset at this latest undoing of their monarch; and the employees, the trades unions and the young, who will see this Elysée Palace farce as a provocation and an encouragement to keep up the struggle."

To add insult to injury, France was plunged into anarchy as the final report on the Sharm El-Sheikh plane crash was issued last week. It offered little relief to the French government.

The Flash Airlines charter plane crashed into the Red Sea killing all 148 passengers and crew on board in January 2004. Most of the passengers were French tourists who had spent their Christmas holidays in the holiday resort. More than 100 bodies were flown to France in 2004, while the final batch of the remains of the French victims were sent back late last month.

In their report, the Egyptian investigators concluded that technical failures were the main cause for the disaster, but did not spell out a specific cause. However, although Shaker Kelada, chief Egyptian investigator, declared that there were no "differences of opinion", the cause of the crash remains contested by the French. In an article titled "The polemic over the crash continues", Le Figaro (25 March 2006) reported that "French investigators are looking into the human error factor". The Flash Airlines aircraft was only 10 years old and was, according to reports, regularly serviced in Norway. It was captained by a pilot with more than 5,000 hours of flying experience, but Paul-Louis Arslanian, chief of the Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyses de l'Aviation Civile Française, blames the incident on "the lack of sleep" of the pilot and insists, as reported by Le Figaro "that he (the pilot) had moved very quickly from a military status to that of ' commandant de bord "," and as such "may have missed a transition".

Quoting Kelada, Le Monde (25 March 2006) writes that none of the four hypotheses for technical failures that were simulated during the two-year long investigation to find the cause of the crash were conclusive. However, it adds that the conclusions "counter those of the Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyses de l'Aviation Civile Française" whose chief believes that "the plane was navigable all the time." As far as the French investigators are concerned, says Le Monde, "the responsibility of the pilot is clear ... we consider that it was the spatial disorientation of the pilot that led the plane to tilt to the right." Le Monde concludes its article with a declaration made by Dominique Perben, the French minister of transport who, while receiving the families of the victims, announced that the findings of the report would be transmitted to both the Egyptian and French Ministries of Justice.