'Third man' can't be ignored
Monday 02 April 2012
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/news/content/view/full/117373
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/news/content/view/full/117373
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EmailThe French radical Left Front's presidential candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon has gained four percentage points in two weeks in opinion polls, a result that would see him take the third spot in the first of the two-round vote for France's head of state.
He would win 15 per cent of the first round on April 22, the LH2/Yahoo poll suggested, overtaking far-right Marine Le Pen, who was on 13.5 per cent.
The same poll gave Socialist Francois Hollande victory in the first round with 28.5 per cent of the vote, against 27.5 per cent for incumbent rightwinger Nicolas Sarkozy.
For the May 6 second-round vote, Hollande would garner 54 per cent and Sarkozy 46 per cent. Hollande has lost one point since March 18, while Sarkozy has gained one.
Melenchon's success suggests his radical left-wing programme and steps to steer Hollande's agenda left are having an impact.
The Socialists are reacting to Melenchon's rising star by showing an hitherto unseen openness to dialogue with him and the Left Front.
In an interview on Saturday, Hollande's "special representative" Arnaud Montebourg said he believed it would be possible to "negotiate with Jean-Luc Melenchon" when it came to legislative elections in June.
"The Socialists don't know what to do," says the head of Melenchon's campaign Francois Delapierre.
"Their strategy was 'let's ignore him,' but they are now forced to change that."
Former Socialist minister Melenchon, who drew 120,000 people to a rally in Paris on March 18 and has attracted thousands to local events around the country since his campaign started, is planning to intensify mass public meetings, with one a day planned until the vote.
The Left Front (Front de Gauche) is an alliance between the Communist Party and the Left Party, which in turn is formed of former Socialists, people who hadn't been members of a political party before and dissidents from the Green Party. It first stood in the 2009 European elections.
Melenchon's programme calls for control over the banks, a completely new relationship between France and other European countries, "ecological planning" and the dismantling of Nato.
It also calls for stronger workers' rights, new powers for workers to "pre-empt" or "requisition" plants faced with closure, a ban on lay-offs for companies that have paid dividends to shareholders and measures to make it unattractive to relocate industries to countries where the cost of labour is lower.
Saturday saw 50,000 anti-debt campaigners march on the symbol of Italian capitalism, the Milan bourse known as Piazza Affari.
An array of civil society opponents of the Mario Monti government gathered to raise their voice, including the smaller radical Cobas unions, left-wing activists and trade unionists like Giorgio Cremaschi, a senior figure in the metalworkers' union FIOM.
"I am ashamed when Monti boasts abroad that he has introduced brutal social reforms without any real opposition," said Cremaschi ahead of Saturday's event, dubbed "Occupy Piazza Affari."
"It won't be a political event but an open assembly that will distil all the themes that are undermining our serenity in the future and we hope we can mobilise all those who don't want to pay the price of decisions in which they played no role."
Among the participants were workers from factories and workplaces that have closed or are faced with closure and workers who risk losing their jobs, from transport and logistics firm Argol, train maintenance company Wagon-Lits, the Alcoa aluminium plant in Sardinia, shipbuilder Fincantieri and carmaker Fiat, as well as migrant workers.
The protest was against the "social butchery" of the the Monti government, said Cremaschi, starting with the labour reforms and failure to the tackle burgeoning precarious forms of working in the country.
It also took aim at the government support for banks or, as Cremaschi put it, "Speculators who have created the country's debt mountain ... and against the repression that tries to stop and divide the popular movement that opposes spreading precarity, mass unemployment, environmental devastation and the continuous chipping away at rights."
"We must relaunch a social and political opposition that aims for a different social and economic model based on 'common goods' and that guarantees rights - health, education, dignified work, housing, an income for all, freedom and full democracy for all Italians and migrants," said the organisers.
The protest follows a growing revolt against the government of technocrat Monti.
Strikes have been held almost daily in different parts of the country over the past two weeks.
The CGIL is planning a national stoppage and so is the engineering section of the UIL union confederation.
The reforms have also caused rifts in the centre-left Democratic Party, Monti's second-biggest parliamentary backer, destabilising the alliance on which he depends to govern.
Most Italians are unconvinced Monti's assertions that a reform making it easier to fire people will create jobs or be fairer. A recent poll found 67 per cent of respondents opposed the measure.
The same poll showed Monti's support falling to 44 per cent from 62 per cent in early March.
Two million German public-sector workers will get a pay rise of 6.3 per cent over a 24-month period in a deal that ends a labour dispute that has disrupted services across Germany.
The deal, sealed between the government and the Verdi trade union on Saturday, ends the threat of a broader walkout following a series of warning strikes that have disrupted Europe's largest economy.
German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, speaking at a meeting of European finance ministers in Copenhagen, called it a "reasonable outcome" although it went "to the outer limits of what the federal government and communities can afford."
Verdi, one of Germany's biggest and most influential unions, representing two million public-sector workers, had been seeking a 6.5 per cent rise for one year after years of accepting modest pay deals.
Overall, wages for some nine million German workers are up for negotiation this year and the public-sector deal may serve as a model for other unions.
However, IG Metall has said it would seek an annual rise of up to 6.5 per cent for its three million members in Germany.
As Schaeuble says, this is a most "reasonable" settlement. German workers have been putting up with years of restrained pay growth, despite the so-called German "economic miracle."
This squeeze on incomes for the 99 per cent has coincided with a steadily more generous flow of millions to Germany's 1 per cent.
Last year the CEOs of Germany's 30 biggest companies saw their pay rise 9 per cent to the highest level for five years, according to management consultancy firm HKP.
The fat cats at the top of the 30 companies in Germany's blue-chip Dax stock index earned an average €5.04 million in 2011 - 8.7 per cent more than in 2010 and the highest level since 2006, the HKP study found.
Last year's biggest single earner was Volkswagen chief Martin Winterkorn, who earned a record €16.6m including bonuses.
Deutsche Bank CEO Josef Ackermann was in second place with €9.355m.
At the bottom of the fat-cat ranking was poor old Thomas Quaas, head of cosmetics group Beiersdorf, who only took home €1.42m, while Commerzbank chief Martin Blessig earned just €500,000 because the bank is currently under "state supervision" - the state owns 25 per cent of the bank and has given it €18 billion in state aid.
Compared to fat cats elsewhere around the globe, VW's Winterkorn is the third-highest paid chief executive, behind Robert Iger of Walt Disney, with the equivalent of €21.85m, and Hewlett-Packard's Leo Apotheker with €18.12m.
Tom Gill blogs at revolting-europe.com
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