THE leader of France’s most powerful union has promised more protests and strikes in the next few days after hundreds of thousands of workers took to the streets last week in a demonstration against plans to increase pension contributions.

Bernard Thibault, leader of the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), warned President Nicolas Sarkozy not to underestimate public anger over pension reforms.

“People’s anger is real,” he said in an interview with The Sunday Times, “and we will mobilise them.”

Thibault described last Thursday’s protests against proposals to make people pay pension contributions for 41 years instead of 40 as an “unquestionable success”.

He dismissed suggestions that Sarkozy, who has promised to modernise France through a series of economic and social reforms, had won the first round of the struggle with unions by pushing through measures raising the minimum retirement age for some workers and making it harder for them to paralyse the country during a strike.

“A lot of governments have made the mistake of thinking that French unions are weak,” said Thibault, 49.

It was Thibault, as head of the CGT’s railway workers, who forced Alain Juppé, the prime minister, to abandon pension reform amid strikes in 1995. Juppé was ejected from office two years later. Subsequent governments also withdrew reforms when confronted with noisy union protests.

Sarkozy has vowed not to abandon pension reform or his cherished goals of reining in the public sector and loosening rigid labour laws, but the recent collapse of his popularity has complicated that task.

Things are also difficult, however, for the unions, whose membership has declined in recent years.

“Luckily we have the power to mobilise people,” said Thibault in his spacious office in a glass-fronted building on the edge of Paris. He acknowledged that Sarkozy had been elected on a platform of economic reform, but claimed he had tricked voters with false promises of prosperity.

“Nearly 70% of people believe that French society will be more divided at the end of his term,” he said.

Knowing that unions could prove the key to reform,

Sarkozy has wined and dined their leaders in Paris restaurants, but Thibault, a communist whose union is regarded as the most intransigent, is unimpressed by such overtures.

He would agree to meet “Sarko” only in the Elysée Palace, he said.

“He [Sarkozy] is a lawyer by training and among the virtues of lawyers is knowing how to defend the most desperate causes,” said Thibault.

A keen bream and roach fisherman, however, Thibault knows that success requires patience. “So long as the unions remain united,” he said, “we will have the strength that we need to make the government back down.”

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