EDITORIAL: Should the high school movement halt?

Stop or still? “You have to know how to end a strike.” We know the words of Maurice Thorez, the general secretary of the Communist Party, encouraging workers to return to work the day after the conclusion of the Matignon Accords, under the Popular Front in 1936.

Ninety years later, the formula has not aged a bit. It is again and again this same dilemma which arises this time for the high school students after six weeks of mobilization. Thorez's sentence rings even more true if we quote it in full: "We must know how to end a strike as soon as satisfaction has been obtained, we must even know how to agree to compromise if all the demands have not yet been accepted but if we have obtained victory over the most essential and important ones."

Also read • Live Strike of November 5: more than 250 actions announced throughout France, according to a GGT map - Follow our live A matter of interpretation and balance of power. On the interpretation side, the leaders of the high school union organizations consider that the government has only granted them “crumbs”. Late but costly crumbs for the executive.

Politically first with the announced replacement of Parcoursup, and then financially with in particular the creation of positions to limit the number of students per class to 28 or four billion loans to local authorities to renovate school buildings. Not sure that a government at the end of its life and whose coffers are empty can do much more. A decisive day On the balance of power side, the mobilization is declining and the movement is now in the minority: less than 1% of high schools blocked, according to the Ministry of National Education, around 10% according to the high school unions, with a large majority of students who want to return to classes, particularly in anticipation of the baccalaureate, without counting the majority of parents who push the same direction.

So what do high school students who want to continue the movement hope for? Reinforcement. On the part of students, and then employees, especially in the public sector, who enter into the social dance against a backdrop of demands for purchasing power.

This is the challenge of today: a half-hearted mobilization should accelerate the return to order in schools. Conversely, the joining of movements could offer a second wind to high school anger and cause stalemate strikes and sporadic blockages to continue for many weeks to come. Enough to fuel an unprecedented climate of social and security tension during a high-risk presidential campaign.

Machine-translated from French