The French Government called yesterday for “team spirit” to pull the country out of the deepening crisis over jobs, protests and government author-ity. But on the eve of a strike that could bring a million people on to the streets today, it is clearly the Government itself that has kicked over all traces of teamwork and is being pulled apart by the ambition, opportunism and cynicism of its leading members.

President Chirac’s intervention has been as extraordinary as it has been destructive. Clearly worried that the street mutiny against the proposed flexible labour law for those under 26 threatens his twelfth and final year in office, he signed the law into effect but immediately nullified it by announcing that he was sending it back for revision. His attempted compromise satisfies no one. The students, emboldened by their sense that the Government appears, yet again, ready to cave in and abandon even a small, if symbolic, attempt to liberalise France’s rigid labour laws, rejected the Elysée’s offer to water down the Prime Minister’s proposals.

The Opposition denounced what it rightly saw as an attempt to bypass Dominique de Villepin by handing the issue to parliament and the governing party, headed by the Prime Minister’s chief rival, Nicolas Sarkozy. And France’s businessman and those few analysts warning the country that it cannot isolate itself from the global market were in despair that, yet again, the ruling class appears more concerned with courting popularity than telling voters the truth about France’s dire economic outlook. Little wonder, therefore, that 62 per cent of those asked said that they were unconvinced by a president who appears to be almost devoid of political power or authority.

The obvious casualty of the fiasco has been M de Villepin. Not only has he been abandoned by his President and had publicly to recant his former determination to stand firm; he has also seen his presidential ambitions fatally undermined. He is yet another prime ministerial casualty of France’s inability to grasp the nettle of social and economic reform.

A more serious casualty, however, is M Sarkozy. His strength has always been his willingness to voice the unpopular truth, whether it be on the conditions in the suburbs or the need for a break with consensus politics. But opportunism has tainted his credibility. His abandonment of the first real attempt to reduce unemployment in the ghettos may acknowledge that the measure is now probably past saving. But it smacks of political sharp practice, a convenient way to knife his presidential rival. That is hardly the best qualification for future office in the Elysée Palace.