French Strikes - The Dress Rehearsal Ends!

The service stations across France are steadily being replenished and the garbage cleared from the streets of Marseille. The new pension ages over which the confrontation supposedly took place will pass into law following the constitutional challenge which will almost certainly fail. The remarkable thing for me in watching the process of the strike unfold was that the support of the French people as reflected in opinion polls remained remarkably steady at around 66% throughout. A warning shot has been fired across the bows of the French establishment, President Sarkozy in agreeing to a new EU Treaty with Angela Merkel the German Chancellor during the peak days of his confrontation with the unions and students of France seems determined not to learn any lessons. Proceeding with a new treaty to enforce the economic governance of the entire EU following the German economic model of governance, presumably enforced along German lines of control, will not just prove difficult for the smaller former nations of the EU to accept (read one item from the Irish Times, linked here) but appears unlikely to be acceptable to the people of France. I summarised my views on the real underlying cause of the recent energy supply confrontation in France linked here, on 19th October, in a post titled "The deep anger behind the rench strikes", my views have not changed and I stress again this particular point: The voters of France clearly rejected, by referendum, any further EU Constitutional Treaty, yet such was signed and enacted as the Lisbon Treaty. At the subsequent Presidential election, neither candidate, neither Nicolas Sarkozy nor Ségolène Royale, offered a platform respecting the clearly stated 'NO MORE EU' views of the electorate. The consequences of yet one more EU Treaty being imposed without the consent of the French electorate, could not, following this strike, be any clearer. Would that the British would show similar resolve in protecting their sovereignty and resisting this EU tyranny!