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NEWS & LETTERS, July 2004Our Life and Times by Kevin A. BarryEuropean elections and French strikesIn a period when some have viewed the European Union as a counterweight to the U.S., recent events have called this into question. While the European public remains decisively opposed to Bush’s war and occupation of Iraq, support for European unity is not nearly as widespread, as shown by the June 12 elections for the European Parliament and the extremely difficult negotiations over a European constitution. Not only was turnout on June 12 lower than in past years, but in several countries, nationalist parties opposed to European unity also gained headway. This was especially true in Britain, where the small UK Independence Party received a stunning 17% of the vote, just behind Labor (22%), and the Conservatives (27%). For Britain’s Tony Blair, it was a stinging defeat, as was the local election a few days earlier when his Labor Party did not even manage to place third. While it was a defeat for Blair, these elections were hardly a victory for anti-war forces, with right-of-center parties gaining the most. One exception was the London mayoralty election, where leftist Laborite Ken Livingstone coasted to victory. If anti-war sentiment sunk Blair, it did not seem to help Germany’s Gerhard Schroeder, a vocal opponent of Bush’s war, in the Europarliament elections. With unemployment standing at over 10% and rising, Christian Democrats played on fears over the economy and immigration to score a two-to-one victory over Schroeder’s Social Democrats, who experienced their worst showing since World War II. France’s President Jacques Chirac is the European head of state who is the most prominent critic of Bush’s war. Again, however, an anti-war stance did not shield his government from voter anger. The Socialist Party scored an almost two-to-one victory over Chirac’s conservative alliance in the Europarliament elections. It was in France that jockeying among bourgeois parties gave way to something more fundamental, a determined effort by the working class to place its own stamp upon national politics. For months, Chirac’s government has been pressing forward with plans to privatize the electrical power industry. Fearing layoffs and cutbacks in wages, benefits, and working conditions, electrical power workers have held strikes and mass demonstrations. Despite only hesitant support or even opposition from union leaders, strikers cut off electric power to parts of the national transportation system on June 7, disrupting trains and subways for over 500,000 commuters. With a touch of Gallic humor, masked workers wearing union badges also disconnected the power supply to the homes of Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin and several other politicians who favor privatization. So far, much of the public seems to support the workers, rather than the increasingly unpopular Chirac-Raffarin government. |
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