2023-07-05 00:05:01
Reassure tourists and investors: the French Minister of the Economy, Bruno Le Maire, spoke to international viewers on CNN on Tuesday evening to insist that the riots affecting France would have no consequences on growth and economic development. attractiveness of the country.
On the second day of a relative calm after several nights of riots sparked by the death of young Nahel, described by Bruno Le Maire as a “tragedy” both “unacceptable” and “unforgivable”, the minister tried to reassure on the situation. “This will have no impact on French growth, on French attractiveness or on French tourism,” he said on CNN, speaking in English to an international audience that has its eyes fixed on France and its images of violent nocturnal riots triggered by the death on June 27 of Nahel, a 17-year-old teenager shot at point-blank range by a police motorcyclist.
“The French economy is solid, the daily life of French citizens is not threatened by what happened,” added Bruno Le Maire. “We are returning to a calmer situation,” he said.
“France is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world and we will do everything to keep it that way, naturally guaranteeing the safety of all tourists on French soil”, also declared the minister in an interview with the British newspaper The Telegraph. France hopes to receive King Charles III “in the coming months”, underlined Bruno Le Maire, while the visit of the monarch had been canceled at the end of March due to social protests against the pension reform.
No wave of cancellations, assures Olivia Grégoire
Earlier in the day, the French government had already wanted to be reassuring about a possible impact of the riots on tourism in Paris, at the start of the summer tourist season and one year before the Olympic Games organized in the capital. “You have to keep your cool, we don’t have a wave of cancellations in Paris,” said the Minister Delegate for Tourism, Olivia Grégoire. “We are holding on to tourism,” she insisted.
The platforms questioned by its teams reported a “wriggling at -0.5, -2%, but that does not allow any conclusions to be drawn”, assured the minister. However, according to the boss of the Paris Tourist Office, Jean-François Rial, the situation is more critical, with “thousands of cancellations”, which he had assessed on Sunday for AFP “around 20-25 % on international customers” in early July in the French capital.
“We had a 25% growth in American customers in Paris since the start of the year, which compensated for the absence of Chinese and Russians, and we were particularly hitting the high end,” he said. precise. Japanese, Chinese, American and South American customers are particularly considered to be particularly sensitive to security issues.
The employers’ union GNC, the National Group of Hotel Chains, has meanwhile identified “between 2 and 5% drop on (the) objectives for the first ten days of July” which “were very good”, indicated its president, Jean -Virgile Crance, evoking a “much more moral and sometimes material damage for the establishments affected”. Activity “should remain good in the summer of 2023, barring a turnaround in the internal security situation,” he told AFP.
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