Word: laboral
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Sarkozy also wants to reform pensions and liberalize the labor market - always explosive issues. His objectives for the next 100 days on hot topics like immigration, justice and education are popular, but the social context he'll be facing won't be favorable. His first major electoral test will be French municipal elections next March, when the Socialists could recapture strategic cities like Toulouse, Bordeaux, Reims, Rouen and Caen. Before then, Sarkozy counts on demonstrating the left's weakness, which he can do only as the young General Bonaparte did upon becoming First Consul: by portraying each new battle...
...action or just agitation? He is running hard, but to where? Sarkozy utters all the right words, such as "globalization" and "liberalization." But when it comes to tackling France's sclerotic labor market, he talks of "assouplissement" - softening. He wants to tinker with the 35-hour workweek, not scratch it. To encourage workers, he wants to cut taxes on overtime. How to push growth? Let's have a commission first...
...have a proven record of stopping reforms in their tracks - just ask Jacques Chirac, who in 1995 saw his modest plans for reforming the welfare state rejected by hundreds of thousands of angry protesters; or Dominique de Villepin, whose even more modest efforts to tweak the French youth labor market some 10 years later were similarly rejected. Even when the French do not bring down governments with their feet, they bring them down with their ballots - in every parliamentary election since 1978 and before 2007, the French voted out whichever party they had voted in the previous time...
...slowly happening in laggards like Australia and the U.S as well. Howard's sudden conversion on climate change is at least partially driven by the fact that global warming has emerged as a top concern among voters in Australia, which has suffered through years of extreme drought. The opposition Labor Party, which has pledged to sign the Kyoto Protocol, is leading in most opinion polls, and an election will occur before the end of the year. "Environmental issues have moved to the center of mainstream politics here," says Cook...
...said. Amazing, indeed. Petraeus has presided over a remarkable turn of events in Iraq. The most recalcitrant areas of the country-the heartland of the Sunni insurgency-have suddenly become the most placid. The safest place for President George W. Bush to land when he visited Iraq on Labor Day was al-Asad air base in Anbar province; a year ago, a military-intelligence report said the province had been "lost" to the jihadis. Now AQI seems to have been kicked out of Anbar, pushed back from Baghdad, forced to carry out its most lethal attacks on the northern periphery...