Manifest avec nous à douze heures et demi...

Today was the second Tuesday in a row that unions around the country 'united' in striking to protest the CPE. This strike was a lot lighter than the previous one. Arriving at my school this morning, I passed were a couple young people standing at the school gate handing out flyers and inviting people to join them in demonstrating (manifester) today. In fact, the students at the engineering school I go to are lucky that they can still attend classes and do their work, because a number of other universities are still blocked by protesters. The situation is giving rise to regularly held anti-strike demonstrations, which are much smaller but resonate pretty strongly with the opinions of the students I work with. My first reponse to the demonstrations by the students was that it was great that the French feel empowered to take action when the government does something they don't like. And then, with the length of time of the strikes and their growing intensity, I thought it was amazing that they were so stubborn and amazing also that the government didn't step in and require the schools to reopen during some negotiation. But now, it seems like it was too late to stop the law and that the demonstrations mainly affected the political landscape for the coming presidential elections. I hate to think that all of this time and energy was spent for campaign posturing.