After the French government's humiliating defeat on the "CPE" (contrat première embauche), the international press pessimist reactions contrast sharply with the victory parade of protesters and opponents to the legislation.
Positions: According to Time magazine, the past ten weeks of revolt have nothing to do with the glorious French revolutionary tradition. The so-called fight "against precariousness" is "a very long way from liberty, equality and fraternity," since it just represents "a demand for an arbitrary powerful state in whose bosom you can settle for life" by young middle-class people afraid of taking risks. In an interview for Le Monde, former Commissioner Chris Patten finds this lack of "adventure spirit" among the French young generation "rather depressing," and regrets the absence of "European vision" within both the French population and the political elite who is accountable for it.
For most European newspapers quoted in Courrier International, the failure of Chirac and De Villepin reveals three major handicaps of the French model:
• Ill-adapted institutional system (La Libre Belgique): the legislative power can easily be neglected by the executive, itself reluctant to social dialogue and dependent on party discipline. This produces "a blocked state, which progresses only by convulsions, and in which decision-makers are completely disconnected from the public opinion."
• Lack of coherent, hence credible political leadership, since a disunited government tried to implement a liberal, "Thatcherite" solution to growing youth unemployment while also "trying to shut out foreign companies from takeovers in France"(The Guardian).
• Lack of clear, two-ways communication strategy about the reform plans (Svenska Dagbladet): if it is "high time [for politicians] to listen to what the French people are saying,"according to Jean-Marc Ayrault, leader of the Socialist opposition (Spiegel online), the government "should [also] have explained more clearly what was ne
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