Is France Unreformable?

A seemingly endless parade of violent protests, transport strikes and paralyzed infrastructure in recent months has once again given the impression of France as a country that cannot be governed.

But how much does the cliche reflect reality?

"This country often kills itself with its conservatism, with the impossibility of reform," bemoaned Prime Minister Manuel Valls recently after three months of unrest triggered by his government's attempt to reform the labor code.

Tens of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets on numerous occasions, accusing the government of trying to inject a distinctly un-French dose of neo-liberalism into their famously stringent worker protections.

The unions have gone to war with the government, launching strikes and blockades on multiple fronts -- from petrol refineries and nuclear power stations to trains and airlines -- and refusing to back down from their demand that the entire reform package be scrapped.

The Spanish daily El Pais summed up the foreign view of the country: "France does not allow deep reforms, only revolutions."

- 'Psychological block' -

The statistics are hard to compare, but Kurt Vandaele, a researcher with the Belgium-based European Trade Union Institute, said when it comes to the most strikes, France ranked in the top four in the European Union alongside Cyprus, Greece and Spain.

That is despite the fact that only 11 percent of the working population is actually part of a union.

"In France, the number of strike days per year is generally closely tied to reforms proposed by the government, almost always related to the labor market or pensions," said Vandaele.

Pascal Lamy, ex-head of the World Trade Organization and himself a Frenchman, said his fellow citizens had "a psychological block" when it came to reforms.

"The French are scared of the outside world because they think it threatens our culture, our principles, our identity," he told Le Point magazine this week.

"We don't have a method for carrying out reforms."

Stephane Sirot, an historian and specialist on labour affairs, said there was a "culture of conflict" that stretches back to the birth of the modern French state.

"Since the French Revolution, social regulation has been based on the idea of conflict first, followed by negotiation."

That model is replicated in other parts of southern Europe, he said, and it is the opposite of how things are usually done in northern Europe, where "conflict only happens when negotiation fails".

- 'Move towards negotiation' -

But he said other factors also helped explain differences between European countries -- for instance, the fact that German public sector workers are banned from going on strike by law.

The statistics also mask a significant decline in France's labor unrest, with the number of annual workdays lost to strikes falling from between three and four million between 1946 and 1975, to half that number in the past decade.

Since the 1980s, "France has tried to move towards a more peaceful model and a culture of collective negotiation has emerged bit by bit, at least within companies," said Sirot.

While only a few hundred agreements were reached between unions and companies in the 1970s, there are now nearly 40,000 in place.

Even the powerful CGT union, which is currently leading the charge against the government’s reform bill, has agreed to 85 percent of the deals signed with management, he added.

The biggest challenge for the government in the current crisis has actually come from its own camp.

A sizeable number of Socialist MPs refused to back the reform bill, forcing the government to ram the bill through the lower house without a vote -- a move that seriously damaged its credibility and encouraged still more protests.

The leading presidential candidate of the opposition Republicans, Alain Juppe, argued that the real problem lay with the divisions inside the ruling Socialists.

Under his leadership, things would work out differently, he said.

"France is not unreformable. France is evolving. Reforms have been made," he told Le Monde newspaper.