Chirac: France is strong because France is France
What happened to France's joie de vivre? (Susan Sachs, Christian Science Monitor)
The unemployment rate is falling. Nine out of 10 teenagers tell pollsters that they are happy in home and at school. France is the world's fifth-largest economy, with one of Europe's biggest public sectors, where jobs are essentially guaranteed for life.
And at this very moment, millions of French families are at the seaside or in country homes enjoying their five weeks of paid vacation after working a 35-hour workweek the rest of the year.
So why are they so pessimistic about the state of their economy?
The answer, according to many French people, is fear.
"In France we don't believe in growth," wrote Jean-François Deniau, a member of the prestigious Academie Française, in the newspaper Le Figaro this week. "In the opinion polls the so-called market economy is rejected by two-thirds of the population, which dreams of closing the borders and splitting up the cake of work, employment guaranteed. It's fear."
President Jacques Chirac, now in the last year of his presidency, rails often against what he calls the "declinologues" of his country, using a word that does not appear in dictionaries but is immediately understood. France is strong, he has said, because France is, after all, France.
Yeah!
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 07/17/06 23:20 | International | Technorati
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