A crisis? Which crisis?

I was planning to write my first post on the C.P.E, the much fought First Employment Contract. But as time passed, it became clearer and clearer that all this crisis is not so much about the contract itself (which I will not comment), but about the incapacity of the Prime Minister to negotiate anything. And this is caused by his rivalry with the Minister of Interior, his arch-rival, to decide who will be candidate in next year's presidential election. This was visible in many ways since the beginning, but taken to its extreme last friday, when the majority party (headed by the Minister of Interior) found an agreement with the unions to end the crisis, but the Prime Minister refused it as being too weak (for his personal standing...)

Conclusion: France is going through all these strikes and demonstrations, not because of a real crisis, but because this government needs to create crises to function. You certainly remember the riots of november (not so sure that riot is the right word, considering that there was not very much violence outside of burning lots of cars, which they already do all year round.) That time this was the opposite pattern. The Minister of Interior was very happy to start such a crisis, and keep it going by provocative comments (he knows very well what suburb youth do not like to be called.) When the situation started to get out of control, he could not back lest he would loose his image of though guy who can make France right. He was luckier than the Prime Minister, as suburb youth lacked the organization to call unions to their help, but this could have turned out differently, and the Prime Minister would have been happy to play the conciliatory part in that case.

I'm not pretending that there are no problems in France. Unemployment (and under-employment), racism, violence, bad relations between employers and employees. But this is far from clear that the situation is worse than in many other countries (except maybe for the last item.) Something should be done about these problems. But for the time being, the real crisis seems to be a the top of the state.