The organizers of a Flamenco festival due to start Friday in northern Paris are frantically calling up ticket holders to warn them the show is over before it even began: the dancers and musicians are on strike, reports The Wall Street Journal.
France's performing artists, as well as technicians working in the arts, are protesting against changes to their unemployment benefits system. If the government ratifies an agreement struck between unions and employers groups earlier this year, the intermittent workers will have to pay more into the system and wait longer after the end of a contract before receiving benefits.
"There are all the tickets to reimburse. And now we have to pay the artists for nothing too," said Carole Polonsky, spokeswoman for the Villette Park, where the Flamenco festival was due to take place.
The Flamenco fans aren't alone in their disappointment as cultural events around France fall foul of mounting protests heading into the peak summer festival period—and not for the first time.
In 2003, the Avignon theater festival, which typically sells up to 140,000 tickets, was canceled due to strikes over the same issue. The same thing could happen this year, the festival's organizer Olvier Py warned earlier this week.
The demonstrations expose the gathering resistance to President François Hollande's economic policies, with rail workers currently on strike against a planned reorganization of the state-owned rail industry.
When he came to power in May 2012, the Socialist President set out to govern by building consensus and chalked up a success in early 2013 when employers and unions agreed to make labor laws a little more flexible.
The March agreement on unemployment benefitswhich covers all workers as well as the specific system for performing artistsmarked another step forward in Mr. Hollande's consensual approach. If the government signs off on the deal, it will bring in over €800 million ($1.08 billion) of savings next year.
The conflict over the jobless-benefits plan puts France's Socialist government in a bind. Mr. Hollande is eager to put worker-friendly policies to the fore. But deficits in the overall unemployment system have created around €21 billion in debt when Paris is under pressure to repair its finances.
Opinion polls show Mr. Hollande's popularity has sunk to record lows in recent months. The President even faces resistance from within his own majority: around 40 Socialist lawmakers abstained in April from approving a three-year plan for spending cuts. When the government presented plans for €4 billion of extra cuts this year, the dissenters said they would fight to amend the bill when it goes through parliament.
Performance artists argue austerity will weigh heavily on France, where cultural activity accounts for 3.2% of economic output and employs around 670,000.
"The coming approval of the new unemployment insurance protocol accentuates the gradual suffocation of one the most symbolic, dynamic and federative areas of our society," the performing artists union Profedim said in an open letter to the government.
Read more of this report from The Wall Street Journal.