“Other fears have supplanted that of unemployment, which fuel a generalized climate of mistrust in the country”

2023-12-05 06:30:16

The incomprehension was evident in the words of the Head of State who, speaking on Tuesday November 28 at the Sea Economy Conference, reacted to the ambient music according to which a milestone was missing in this second five-year term: “It turns out that I have been at the helm for a little over six and a half years… The course has always been the same: to look at our future without defeatism, to have with lucid optimism a clear idea of ​​the faults and weaknesses of France and to seek together to correct them”, defended Emmanuel Macron, ensuring that he was “winning the battle for full employment”, even “if necessary” for that “redouble your efforts”.

A relief tinged with combativeness broke through in the interview that the Minister of the Economy gave to ParisianSaturday December 2, the day after the decision of the rating agency S&P Global Ratings not to downgrade France’s rating, despite the country’s high level of debt. Seeing “a recognition of the seriousness of the work carried out to restore public finances”Bruno Le Maire called for “accelerate and maintain the line of structural transformations of our economic and social model”.

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At the same time, the minister advocated the upcoming advent of a Pacte II law aimed in particular at simplifying the life of businesses by reducing the duration of disputes regarding dismissals, town planning and public procurement.

At a time when the government, in search of breathing space, is trying to give coherence to the year 2024, punctuated in June by risky European elections, all the clues are converging: against all odds, the executive is seeking to promote its action economic and social. He is clinging to the objective of reducing the unemployment rate to around 5% of the working population at the end of the second term, while it reached 9% at the dawn of the first. Economic growth may have stalled and unemployment started to rise slightly in the third quarter (+0.2%), but there is no question of giving in to the fatalism of François Mitterrand who, in 1993, recalled with a sigh: “In the fight against unemployment, we have tried everything. »

A deep divide

Emmanuel Macron wants to remain in history as the president of full employment not only for the sake of consistency, the increase in the volume of work underlying his entire economic strategy, but also out of a political desire to strengthen the reformist movement to which he has given birth. To succeed would be to demonstrate that in ten years it has been possible to reform the DNA of a country encysted since the end of the 1970s in mass unemployment.

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