France's celebrity Trotskyist wants general strike

By Gerard Bon

PARIS (Reuters) - French Trotskyist leader Olivier Besancenot may have discussed his favourite singers and love of soccer on a glitzy television chat show, but he hasn't lost sight of his real mission: the workers' struggle.

Besancenot, a postman who scored almost 5 percent in last year's presidential election, drew a huge audience this month with his appearance on "Vivement Dimanche", a Sunday TV show usually more focused on starlets than revolutionaries.

The show confirmed the baby-faced leader of the Communist Revolutionary League as a darling of the media whose influence stretches far beyond his party -- one of three in France that claim the heritage of murdered Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky.

Besancenot is one of the most popular figures on the French left, coming third in a recent poll behind Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoe and former presidential candidate Segolene Royal -- both from the much bigger Socialist Party.

In an interview this week at the Communist Revolutionary League's discreet headquarters in the Paris suburb of Montreuil, the 34-year-old was no longer in the mood for televised frivolities. He wanted to talk about a general strike.

"There comes a time when a general strike is capable of extracting far more concessions than, perhaps, what institutional left-wing governments could do," he said, evoking the spirit of the May 1968 uprising.

France is obsessed with the 40th anniversary of the May '68 movement, in which students disillusioned with capitalism and the conservative morals of the day barricaded the streets of Paris and hurled cobblestones at police.

But Besancenot prefers to remember that the student protests snowballed into a general strike by workers that forced bosses to agree to 30 percent pay rises across the board.