MOTORISTS in eastern France enjoyed free use of toll roads yesterday after protesting workers cut the electricity supply to toll barriers in an orchestrated series of power cuts.
The home of Patrick Devedjian, the Industry Minister, also had its supply cut as the electricity trade union raised the stakes in a battle with President Chirac’s Government over plans to sell part of the state energy monopoly.
The lights went out in the early hours in Bordeaux, Limoges, Arras, Cahors and half a dozen other cities as most of the 170,000 workers of Électricité de France (EDF) began a day of protests.
Their official aim is “preserving the quality of public services”. However, the real goal, according to all but the hard Left, is to protect the privileges that come with a job at the pampered state agency.
The Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), the communist-led trade union whose power is based in the state energy sector, has staked its future on the struggle’s outcome.
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The Government plans to keep a 70 per cent stake in EDF as it turns the giant into a commercial enterprise to meet European Union free-market rules. EDF, which was founded in 1946 and is only now losing its monopoly in France, has pursued an aggressive commercial strategy abroad.
It supplies a quarter of Britain’s electricity through London Electricity, Seeboard and SWEB Energy.
To press their case on the day that parliament began debating the EDF Bill, workers disconnected the homes of a dozen MPs from the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire, M Chirac’s centre-right party, including a château belonging to M Devedjian. Five nuclear and conventional power stations were also shut down.
A furious M Devedjian asked: “In a democracy, who decides? The street or parliament? The matter is being put before parliament, it represents the nation and EDF belongs to the nation. parliament will decide.”
After a month of wildcat actions, the union is determined to block what it deems to be a covert plan to privatise the whole company and its sister, Gaz de France.
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On the Government side, Nicolas Sarkozy, the dynamic Finance Minister and star of the Cabinet, has proved fearful of a replay of public-sector strikes that brought down the Government in 1997. He has given the unions almost everything they want, short of scrapping the Bill to change the statutes of the heavily indebted company.
Workers will be allowed to keep privileges that include a guaranteed job for life, retirement at the age of 53 on 75 per cent of salary, and almost free household electricity.
The unions may have miscalculated in relying on France’s celebrated sympathy for strikers. A poll by Le Parisien yesterday found that 77 per cent of people condemned the wildcat actions. However, only 32 per cent of the public backed the Government’s reform plan for the EDF.
This bodes ill for the campaign being run by Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the Prime Minister, to win support for moneysaving reforms to the health system, state pensions and employment regulations.