France: How the unions broke an offensive of the working class

The fall-off in the size of demonstrations cannot be ascribed to growing support for Sarkozy. In a June 24 BVA poll for the financial daily Les Echos, 63 percent of those polled disapproved of Sarkozys economic policy and 71 percent expressed no confidence in his ability to reduce inflation. Sarkozys approval ratings stand at 36 percent. Banque de France director Christian Noyer and European Central Bank director Jean-Claude Trichet have both called for wage increases to be held below food and fuel price increases, thus helping impoverish workers. The popular mood in France is increasingly bitter and angry.

As is now widely acknowledged by numerous commentators, the treachery of the union bureaucracy played the main role in breaking up and isolating workers opposition to government policies. In a coordinated struggle, the millions of rail, postal, education, industrial, port, restaurant, retail, fishing, trucking and ambulance workers who struck in recent months could easily have shut down the economy, directly challenging the existence of the government and its social programme. Such a struggle depends, however, on the existence of a revolutionary political leadership in the working class.

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