A French Revolution, Perhaps?
It's easy to love France when you don't have to do business here. But, maybe that will change -- or change a little. Katrin Bennhold writes in the IHT that Laurence Parisot, 45, a woman from outside France's big business establishment, was elected this week to lead Medef, a group representing more than 750,000 companies:
Her election is a small revolution in a country where women occupy only 5 percent of board seats for companies listed on the CAC40 stock index.
An expert on public opinion, she takes over at a time of rising anticapitalist sentiment in Europe's third-largest economy, which has been battling high unemployment and sluggish economic growth.
Parisot, who has been on Medef's executive board for two years, faces the challenge of selling economic change to a country whose deep skepticism about globalization came through loudly in the recent referendum on the European constitution. The strong French no vote emboldened the country's militant labor unions and has weakened the government - two years before elections, and just as it pushes ahead with unpopular privatizations of giant state-owned utilities.
But Parisot, who easily beat two other candidates, seemed undaunted. Speaking before a largely male crowd, she pledged to bring business closer to a public that often sees it as the enemy - one out to roll back their generous social and job protections.
"We have to talk about the economy, explain the economy, make people love the economy - the market economy, that is," she told fellow executives to storms of applause. "To have an economic policy that is favorable to companies is not to worsen unemployment.
"On the contrary, it would finally allow a return to full employment."
She blamed the French dislike of big business on the country's long farming tradition and an education system that has failed to rouse passions for economics in the way it has for politics and sociology. "We need to find better ways of teaching it," she said.
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