Youth group out to finesse overhaul in France A young woman's ideas on unions, social issues have some seeing a new Margaret Tha

par Andrea Gerlin

Source : The Philadelphia Inquirer

LANDEDA, France - Inside a conference center in this breezy little Brittany port town this month, some well-dressed young people were busy plotting a new French revolution.

Its leader, Sabine Herold, 22, has been likened to Joan of Arc or Margaret Thatcher for her will to stand up to the entrenched. In June, looking prim in pearls and heels, she climbed atop a telephone booth in the Place de la Concorde in Paris and led 80,000 people in condemning what she called the sloth of France's unionized public-sector workers and exhorting the nation to stand up to them.

It was enough to provoke cries of mon Dieu! - for this is, after all, a country that reveres, even romanticizes, its unions and the role the state and its public workers play in soothing the citizenry's passage through life.

When Herold and the other leaders of Liberte J'Ecris Ton Nom (Freedom I Write Your Name) scheduled the rally after strikes last spring, they had expected a crowd of only 4,000. But they had struck a chord with people frustrated by constant and enervating work stoppages and the drag France's bloated social-welfare system exerts on the economy.

"People were very angry with the strikes," Herold said during a break between sessions at the conference in Landeda. "Most people in France were the silent majority and they couldn't go to work, so they were very, very fed up."

Herold and the other leaders of Liberte want to do nothing less than overhaul France, starting with its social-welfare system. If their ideas were implemented, retirement benefits would be curtailed; more private alternatives would be offered to France's vaunted publicly funded health-care system; and the state-mandated 35-hour workweek and generous vacation allowances would be changed, leaving less time for pursuit of those free-time pleasures the French hold so dear.

The commotion over these radical notions has thrust Herold into the national limelight. Quickly, the attractive Reims native has become a symbol for those French disillusioned with the status quo. A conservative British newspaper invited her to London, where she was wined and dined by parliamentarians and the Tory party leader. She conversed in impeccable English honed during a year at the University of Birmingham.

Herold's appeal has not stopped in Britain. She defends American policies and describes herself as a staunch advocate of free enterprise, longer work hours, globalization, and the right to eat at McDonald's. Choice and individual responsibility are her frequent themes.

"The state shouldn't forbid you to do things that just concern you," Herold said in an interview. "Some people love working 35 hours. Others want to work 70. If you want to work more because you want something for your family, you cannot" in France.

Her group favors same-sex marriage, access to abortion, assisted suicide, and decriminalization of drugs and prostitution. Its members backed the U.S.-led war in Iraq and, before the war began, demonstrated outside the U.S. Embassy in Paris, hoisting placards supporting the U.S. position.

But in France, resistance to change can be well-organized and widespread. Premier Jean-Pierre Raffarin's recent reform proposals, including extending the period that public-sector workers must work to gain full pension benefits, sparked some of the fiercest strikes in recent history. Raffarin also has proposed cutting France's exorbitant income-tax rate by 3 percent. When his government's next round of changes is unveiled later this month, the public-sector unions promise more demonstrations.

If that happens, Herold and her group are prepared to challenge them. Liberte's weekend conference included planning workshops; Herold led one on how to harness the media to spread the message.

France's unions sniff at the idea that Herold and her group represent a threat. A spokeswoman for the largest union, Confederation Generale du Travail, which represents transport workers, said: "I cannot find anyone who is familiar with them."

As a newcomer to politics, Herold has mastered a learning curve adroitly. In an interview, she said she grew up in an apolitical middle-class household in a small village outside Reims and had few political ideas until she went to college. There she joined Liberte, a group founded three years ago by a fellow student, Edouard Fillias, 24, and a student at HEC, France's top business school.

Originally, Herold aspired to become a civil servant, but after three government internships, grew bored and became disgusted with other employees' attitudes because, she said, they did not work hard but wanted to maintain their privileges. She has not ruled out a political career but deems herself too young and inexperienced to enter politics now.

Instead she wants to do graduate work at a top business school. "You can be really useful for your country by creating wealth," she said.

She hopes the publicity that has surrounded her has not spoiled her chances of admission. She has received hate mail and a telephone threat since the June rally. She exudes confidence and her speech is impassioned but not as provocative as another of France's best-known agitators, the antiglobalization activist Jose Bove, whose protests have landed him in jail.

"She has a nice way of speaking," Fillias said. "She is not confrontational. She does not go on the offensive. She is like a little fiancee to the French."

She has attracted the French media to her cause. Sebastian Le Fol of Le Figaro, the right-leaning Paris daily newspaper, said he became interested in the upstart group because it went into the streets and made demands of established political parties. But Herold, he agreed, is probably too young to launch a career in French politics, which is traditionally dominated by older men.

Political writer Denis Boulard of Le Journal du Dimanche said that in France, student movements such as Liberte come and go all the time, always failing to attract money or recognition. The last one, which began in Rouen in 1997, eventually fizzled.

"The main problem for students is that they get old and have to get a job," Boulard said. "If they accept being rehabilitated by another party, they will disappear. If not, they disappear."