Because personal livelyhood cannot exist without a strong national economy. An economy in the toilet results in unemployment and people out of jobs. It's not that hard of a concept to understand, indeed, its rather obvious.

Indeed, I'll agree with you on that. Villepan should have probably been more diplomatic about pushing it through, and the government has failed miserably, just like every other European government that desperately needs reform, to convince their people that this was not only important, but necessary for France's long term survival as a global power.

In the end, the government botched the attempt miserably, although at the same time, I'm stunned at how little knowledge many French seem to have of how bad the situation really has become.

Although I can take some solace - if you looked at it, students at Economics schools and Sciences Pol didn't protest. The whole spectrum of people who truely understood how important this was didn't fight it, and its a shame people didn't attempt to look to those who knew more on the topic.

It's a sad day, I really do like Chirac and Villepan, even though I'm not French. They genuinely tried something drastic to help France, and if anything, history will give them credit if anything, of having the foresight and the guts to try something nobody will for a long time.

I suppose this is the kind of fear America's founding fathers had in mind when they created to Electoral College, where the mindless masses would just go along with the rest of herd, even if its straight off a cliff and the educated minority would be dragged along with them. But then again our electoral college system hasn't really worked the way the fathers wanted it to anyways.

Bit offtopic, but this blog has nice protest pictures, if you're interested.

Turns out cars are flammable, unforunately.

France's Muslim riots from a few months ago already taught us this, but thanks anyway!

I'm familiar with the hard-to-fire thing. Instead of trying to go through with the normal process I opted for a discourage from working tactic. This wasn't necesarrily 100% effective but it worked.

Okay anyway just to clarify since I'm not so familiar with France.
1. Where does this 22% unemployment rate come from
2. Is the 22% mainly youth or a mixture of French people (young and old)
3. Even if the law is passed what is the projected number of jobs to be available for the youth
4. What type of jobs are available for the youth anyway? And will the 2 year policy be prone to abuse? (well it will be anyway)

1. Youth Unemployment mainly.
2. Mixture of Youth
3. No idea, its meant to allow employers to be more liberal in hiring practices since their biggest impediment was the fact that its impossibly hard to fire workers.
4. Mostly governmental jobs as most of the country aspires for jobs in the public sector in which people are almost never fired. And yes, there is a possibility it would be abused, just like any policy.


But its all failed now, so in a sense, its back to the status quo.