Thousands of French “notaires” held what they said were their first-ever street protests in Paris and Marseille yesterday to challenge plans by President Francois Hollande to deregulate their activities.
Anger at Hollande has driven everyone from medics to taxi drivers onto the streets in recent months but few can have expected to see the well-heeled equivalent to Britain’s solicitors or US notaries public on the march.
Notaries typically take home a net 13,000 euros a month and are better known for their gilded offices and iron-clad professional status than for demonstrations.
Surveys show that Hollande, deeply unpopular over his failure to revive the eurozone’s second largest economy, has broad public support for his plan to deregulate their activities and those of 36 other professions in France: pollster Odoxa last week found a full 78 per cent of French in favour.
But he will nonetheless have to brave fierce resistance from the professions themselves.
Yesterday’s demonstrations by thousands of notaires, trainees and sympathisers follow similar protests by bailiffs, court clerks and taxi drivers and shows how opposition is building to a deregulation drive which Hollande’s cash-strapped Socialist government hopes will show Europe it can reform.
“We have the potential to be quite disruptive – so they shouldn’t mess with us too much,” Regis de Lafforest, head of the national notaire union, told Reuters, hinting at strikes that could damage the eurozone’s second largest economy by freezing everything from property to inheritance transactions.
“That’s something the government appears to have forgotten.”
On Paris’ Place de la Republique, thousands of notaires and supporters wore T-shirts bearing the slogans “I love my notary” and “Life without notaries will be at your expense”.
The European Commission, which is in charge of promoting the free market for goods and services in the 28-member economic bloc, has pressed member states to reduce regulation in certain closed professional sectors to pro-mote competition.
France – which the Commission’s website shows has in fact fewer regulated jobs than Austria or Germany – has long brushed off those calls.