France’s employment minister was taken to hospital yesterday with a “malaise” after President Hollande surrendered to a revolt in his left-wing camp and watered down reforms intended to loosen the country’s stifling labour laws.
Mystery surrounded the condition of Myriam El Khomri, 38, who has borne the brunt of anger in Mr Hollande’s Socialist party over planned measures that tinkered with the sacrosanct 35-hour maximum working week and allowed employers to make staff redundant without punitive penalties.
Mr Hollande said that the Moroccan-born minister had suffered a domestic accident involving a shower while her office said that she had suffered a malaise. She was taken to hospital for unspecified tests and was due to be released last night.
Jean-Marie Le Guen, the minister for relations with parliament, blamed leftwing dissidents for hounding Ms El Khomri and wearing her out. “The way that this young minister has often been attacked has weighed heavily on her,” he said. Martine Aubry, the figurehead of the party old guard, last week published a vitriolic attack on the “El Khomri law”, calling it a symptom of the goverment’s failure.
Ms El Khomri, who was appointed last September, had been given the task of steering the reform package after Mr Hollande deemed that it had been tainted by its association with its driving force, Emmanuel Macron, the 38-year-old economy minister. On Monday Mr Macron said that the reform package would “make or break François Hollande’s political legacy”.
Advertisement
Socialist backbenchers and left-wing voters depicted the measures as a betrayal of the “progressive” laws that guarantee the French job security and low working hours. Mr Macron and Manuel Valls, the prime minister, argued that labour protection laws were maintaining near-record unemployment.
Aware that he risked parliamentary defeat, Mr Valls said on Monday that the legislation would be reworked. The centre-right opposition seized on his words as a humiliating retreat. “The government is governing no more. It only knows how to play for time,” Bruno Retailleau, Senate leader of Nicolas Sarkozy’s Republicans party, said.