Chirac tries to calm anger above new labour law

French President Jacques Chirac today urged immediate negotiations between the government and students and unions to defuse escalating anger over a new labour law that sparked nationwide marches and clashes with police.

“The government is ready for dialogue,” Chirac said during a ceremony at the presidential palace. “I hope it starts as quickly as possible.”

A quarter of a million people took to streets in some 200 demonstrations around France on yesterday, in a test of strength between youth and the conservative government of 73-year-old Chirac.

The students’ anger focuses on a new type of job contract that would make it easier for employers to fire workers in their first two years on a job.

But the protests reflect broader discontent with the government and France’s direction.

Chirac stood by the law, calling it “an important element in the policy of fighting unemployment.”

The new contract “will create new jobs for young people who are today largely left out of the job market,” he said.

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin appealed for calm before students’ final exam periods.

“We want students to be able to prepare for their exams in peace, to be able to have the freedom to study,” he said before a meeting with university presidents.

The next major test will come tomorrow, when unions and students plan to march together. Chirac appealed to all sides to remain calm and responsible for those marches.

In yesterday’s protests, most of the violence – and the arrests – were around the Sorbonne university in Paris, where police fired water cannons and tear gas at youths who pelted them with stones and set cars on fire.

Some 92 police officers and 18 protesters were injured, Paris police said.

A total of 272 people were detained nationwide, 187 of them in Paris, the Interior Ministry said.

The country’s main student union condemned the violence, which police blamed on fringe groups of radicals and anarchists – and a few petty criminals who broke into a jewellery store in the melee.

“There was a demonstration that went smoothly and then there were a few delinquents who came to pick a fight,” Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy told reporters.

If the government faces down the escalating groundswell of protest, Chirac’s prime minister and supposed preferred successor, Villepin, and his ideas for revitalising France will have scored a major victory heading into next year’s presidential race.

If not, Villepin’s presidential ambitions may be finished and the government’s reforms discredited.

The contract Villepin has championed allows employers to fire young workers within their first two years in a job without giving a reason.

The government says the flexibility will encourage companies to hire young people, bringing down unemployment rates that run at 23% among young adults and around double that in some of the depressed suburbs that were shaken by weeks of riots last year.

The job contract was one of the government’s responses to that violence. But students fear it will erode France’s coveted labour protections – which make it very hard for employers to fire workers – and leave the young by the wayside.

Jean-Louis Borloo, minister in charge of social cohesion, suggested today that employers should be required to explain why workers are fired. Employers “should obviously justify” any firings, he said on France-2 television.

But his ministry later backtracked, insisting Borloo was standing by the law.

Villepin said yesterday that he was “open to dialogue, in the framework of the law, to improve the first job contract” – but showed no sign of withdrawing the measure, as protesters demand.

Yesterday’s protests in Paris began peacefully, with students whistling, chanting and beating drums.

Later, however, tension mounted and police and rioters waged a back-and-forth battle amid acrid clouds of tear gas outside the Sorbonne on the Left Bank.

Several hundred youths threw Molotov cocktails, paving stones, metal crowd-control barriers, and tables and chairs taken from nearby cafes. Cars were overturned and torched.